How and Why I Taught
My Toddler to Read
By Larry Sanger
sanger@watchknow.org
Version 1.1, revised December 14, 2010
Published online December 13, 2010
Downloadable at larrysanger.org
This essay is licensed under a Creative
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Commons
Attribution-
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION: WHY THIS ESSAY ........................................................................................... 3
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .......................................................................................................... 7
PART 1: HOW MY LITTLE BOY LEARNED TO READ AS A TODDLER .......... 9
1. EARLY LITERACY ACTIVITIES ............................................................................................... 9
2. AN ECLECTIC METHOD OF TEACHING A SMALL CHILD TO READ: SUMMARY................................. 12
3. PHONICS FLASHCARD METHOD ........................................................................................ 18
4. YOUR BABY CAN READ .................................................................................................. 25
5. READING BOOKS ........................................................................................................... 28
6. CONCEPT-BUILDING: PRESENTATIONS, THE DOMAN METHOD, AND OPD ................................. 35
7. OTHER EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES THAT HELPED WITH LEARNING TO READ ................................. 40
8. PLANS FOR OUR SECOND CHILD........................................................................................ 43
PART 2: TEACHING THE VERY YOUNG TO READ—A DEFENSE ............... 45
1. YES, IT IS POSSIBLE ........................................................................................................ 46
2. THE PROBLEM OF THE SALES HYPE .................................................................................... 57
3. WHY ISN’T THIS ALREADY COMMON KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICE? .......................................... 59
4. THE MARGINALIZATION OF VERY EARLY READING ................................................................. 63
5. THE PRESSURE OBJECTION .............................................................................................. 68
6. THE VICARIOUS ACHIEVEMENT WORRY .............................................................................. 71
7. THE TOO-MUCH-VIDEO, TOO-EARLY OBJECTION .................................................................. 73
8. THE CREATIVE FREE PLAY OBJECTION ................................................................................. 77
9. THE CONCEPTUAL MATURITY OBJECTION ........................................................................... 84
10. THE SAPPED-MOTIVATION OBJECTION ............................................................................. 92
11. THE “MISEDUCATION” OBJECTION.................................................................................. 95
12. DOES EARLY READING REALLY HAVE LONG-TERM ADVANTAGES? ......................................... 101
13. NO NEED TO BE DEFENSIVE ......................................................................................... 110
CONCLUSION .................................................................................... 113
1. SOME TAKE-AWAYS ..................................................................................................... 113
2. WHEN SHOULD WE START TEACHING OUR CHILDREN TO READ, AND HOW?............................. 119
3. THE IMPORTANCE OF SUPPORTING EARLY READERS IN SCHOOL ............................................. 121
4. WHAT IS THE POINT?................................................................................................... 125
BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................. 133
BOOKS AND ARTICLES ...................................................................................................... 133
POPULAR ONLINE ARTICLES AND VIDEOS IN FAVOR OF VERY EARLY READING................................ 136
POPULAR ONLINE ARTICLES AND VIDEOS CRITICAL OF VERY EARLY READING................................. 136
OTHER POPULAR ONLINE ARTICLES ..................................................................................... 137
SOME BOOKS I READ TO MY SON BEFORE HIS FOURTH BIRTHDAY .............................................. 137
INDEX ............................................................................................... 139
Introduction: why this essay
Can we teach our babies to read? Yes. Should we? Probably.
In this essay, I’m going to try to convince parents that it is
possible, and may be beneficial, to teach their children to read
even while they are babies or toddlers. I also have remarks for
researchers throughout. First, I will explain how I taught my own
little one, beginning at age 22 months, and introduce some of our
methods. Then I will answer various general objections to the
notion and practice of teaching tiny tots to read.
You might have heard of “baby reading” from the infomercials
for Your Baby Can Read (YBCR), or maybe an acquaintance
bragged about her 3-year-old reading, or you saw some amazing
videos on YouTube. But I’m going to write this as if you had
never even contemplated the idea of teaching such a young child
how to read.
The suggestion does sound admittedly bizarre at first. You would
probably be justified to dismiss it without a second thought, if it
were not for stories like my little boy’s. At 18 months old he knew
most of the alphabet; a few months later, I decided to start
teaching him to read, using certain methods; by 2½ years old, he
was reading at the first grade level; at 3 years 4 months, he was
reading (or at least decoding) at the fourth grade level; and shortly
before his fourth birthday, he sounded out the First Amendment
of the Constitution. As evidence of this progress I submit this
video. As I first publish this, in December 2010, he is 4.5 and
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
capable of decoding (not comprehending) some of my old
philosophy books from college.
By now, many people have heard of YBCR. Fewer know that
there has a been small movement to teach babies to read, since
Glenn Doman published the first edition of How to Teach Your
Baby to Read in 1964. Doman has made a lot of claims—either
inspiring or extravagant, depending on your point of view—about
the potential of children. Regardless of the rhetoric, I’m
convinced that thousands of children have been taught to read at
surprisingly early ages by following his and similar methods. More
recently, Robert Titzer discovered after making some videos for
his baby daughter that she was able to recognize the words from
the video even at the age of nine months. Based on these videos
he created YBCR, which again appear to have helped very many
tiny tykes to learn to read. Whether they actually have done so is
something I will discuss below in detail.
But why write a long essay on this topic? I have three reasons.
The first is that the phenomenon needs to be discussed in a way
understandable to the public. I want to share what I’ve learned
with parents. With the YBCR phenomenon, and especially with all
the YouTube videos of small children reading, I gather that there
is a lively and growing interest in the whole notion of teaching
very young children to read. But there is not very much objective
information out there about the topic. You can find blogs, articles
(this set of pages from BrillKids.com is excellent), and videos by
people who are in business to sell baby-reading materials, and
other comments from parents and child development students
who are skeptical and disapproving of this movement. You can
also find some quite critical essays online and book discussions
from scholars in the fields of child development, psychology, and
education. (See the Bibliography.)
What is largely lacking, on both sides, is hard-nosed science or
even very careful analysis. I will try to remedy these deficits by
offering a very detailed case study and some in-depth discussion.
Introduction: why this essay
I decided post this essay for free online. I’ve done this sort of
thing before, and it’s one of the great things about the Internet:
people just like to share their knowledge, especially when they
perceive a need. I like the idea that I might help other people by
what I write, and also that I might spark a deeper, better-informed
discussion of the issues.
The second reason is to intrigue psychologists, reading specialists,
and other relevant experts with my own case study and with facts
and arguments that they may have not considered. I would be
delighted if this paper inspired some serious research into the
issues raised here.
The third reason for the essay is to announce that, and explain
why, I and the group of people behind WatchKnow.org are
helping to arrange one of the first careful studies of the
phenomenon of very early reading, and that I am, as of this
writing, in the design stages of a large set of free multimedia
reading tutors for very young children.
A little about me and my background. I work from home and
spend much of my free time helping to educate my first son, who
is now 4½ years old. Don’t get me wrong, please—he spends
most of his day playing. But at mealtimes, bedtime, and
occasionally at other times, I teach him stuff. I have a Ph.D. in
philosophy and a long-standing interest in educational theory, but
no formal training in education and only a little in psychology. I
co-founded Wikipedia and went on to get Citizendium.org and
then WatchKnow.org started—all non-profit, educational sites.
I am not selling any products and have no other business
relationships or financial incentives to teach toddlers to read, nor
do I push just one method, such as Doman’s or Titzer’s.
Actually, I’ll be explaining in most depth the method I’ve
developed and used with my own little boy, which is based on
phonics. But please do not get the idea that I am pushing this
method, either; I am offering it only as a data point for you to
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
consider. I actually used a combination of methods to teach my
boy to read. First, I thoroughly acquainted him with the alphabet
and got him used to the idea of sounding out words with
refrigerator magnets. Next, I started showing him flashcards
(words plus pictures) arranged into increasingly difficult phonetic
groupings, in a systematic order. About the same time, we started
watching Your Baby Can Read—I am glad that I was able to put
aside my misgivings about the off-putting hype surrounding
YBCR and Doman’s method. Both before and after the most
intensive “teaching” period, when he was two, I read huge
amounts to him, which he liked. After I started teaching him to
read, I made a point of always running my finger under the text as
I read to him. That sums up our method, but I’ll explain much
more in Part 1.
I freely acknowledge that I am not an expert on “baby reading”
(few experts on that specific topic exist). But I’ve thought and
read a lot about it, and I think I understand the basics of the
phenomenon well enough to write this essay. Besides, I’m mostly
just reporting on our experience in the first part, and I will tell you
when I am on thin ice, and when I’m disagreeing with the experts,
in the second part. Indeed, you should be forewarned that the
views I express, and perhaps some of the educational activities
we’ve done, are contrary to the conventional wisdom of the child
psychologists and educationists. If you expect a mere summary of
expert opinion, you might as well stop here, because I don’t defer
to the experts nearly as much as any “sensible” person would.
(People familiar with my reputation vis-à-vis Wikipedia and
Citizendium might find this surprising.) But I do follow the
evidence to the best of my ability, and when I see evidence that
does not jibe with conventional wisdom, I do not simply throw
out the evidence.
By the way, I should note that it is perfectly consistent with much
of expert opinion to foster the literacy of children from a very
early age. I am agreeing with the experts when I recommend
reading a lot to babies, using and explaining about many words,
Acknowledgments
and in other ways fostering a language-rich environment. It is not
even unheard-of to try to foster early reading, as J. Richard Gentry
recommends in Raising Confident Readers: How to Teach Your Child to
Read and Write—from Baby to Age 7. Similarly, one prominent
Australian reading expert, Trevor Cairney, is both a critic of
YBCR but also enthusiastic in his encouragement of parents to
foster the natural development of literacy from an early age, even
if this naturally leads to early reading. What many expert critics
seem to oppose are intentional attempts to teach babies to read
through the use of videos and flash cards that are specially
designed to teach them to read.
Anyway, if you find any factual errors in this essay (I’m sure
someone will be able to), let me know at sanger@watchknow.org,
and I will post corrections. I’ve worked on this essay for over two
years, off and on, and had feedback from many people. If you just
want to argue with me, please don’t mail your comments just to
me; post something on your blog, or on my blog, or post your
comments on the Yahoo group TeachYourBabyToRead or the
BrillKids forum, and send me a link to it. If you send an email, I
can’t promise I will respond, because I’m pretty busy, and I would
feel bad about not answering you. But on the other hand I’m very
interested in this stuff these days, so maybe I will.
One last thing. Whatever I may sound like in this essay—which, I
hope, is properly skeptical and thoughtful—I want to assure you
that I do not believe I have all the answers. This is not meant to
be a complete method, much less a general position statement
about all topics in early learning. It is an essay, which means a try,
one that will be very much open to revision as I learn more
myself.
Acknowledgments
I sought feedback from people with a wide variety of views and
training, including mothers with early readers, school teachers,
educational product designers, and experts in psychology and
other fields. While some of these people support very early
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
reading, others disagree with me. None are responsible for my
errors.
Thanks for helpful correspondence, or for commenting
substantially on drafts: Charles Boone, Julia Brown, Trevor
Cairney, Mary Alice Deveny, Alenka Elly Drel, Al Drumm,
Richard Gentry, Jane M. Healy, Nikki Hockaday, Teresa Hopson,
Gerelee Howard, Timothy D. Kailing, Mona McNee, Laura
Rutherford, Robert Titzer, Maryanne Wolf, and K. L. Wong.
Thanks very much to Charles Boone, WatchKnow, and the
Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi for their
support of this project.
PART 1: How my little boy learned to read as a
toddler
In this first part of the essay, I will detail how I have taught my
own son how to read, and say something about other educational
activities that have supported his reading ability. My point is not to
suggest that this is the only way to teach a young child to read.
The point of this is to provide to the public and relevant research
communities at least one detailed example of how a child was
taught to read at a very early age. Frankly—and I seriously mean
no disrespect when I say this—but I have seen all too much
evidence that many reading experts simply are not familiar with
what goes on when a very young child learns to read. I hope this
will provide them with a detailed view into one case.
I’ll be addressing the questions of how it is possible to teach young
children to read, and why one might want to do so, in Part 2 and
the conclusion.
1. Early literacy activities
We have read virtually daily to our son since he was 3 or 6 months
(I don’t remember exactly when we started). We typically read
several books daily—fewer as the years have gone on, because the
books grew longer. As a baby, he usually just sat there and took it
all in. He loved sitting on my lap as I read a dozen board books to
him. Before he was a year old he was turning the pages. We began
with baby books and moved up, around 12 or 15 months, to short
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
simple stories like Clifford the Big Red Dog and the simplest
Dr. Seuss. We never stopped reading lots every day, at least an
hour a day, and in the first few years often over two hours (but
spread out throughout the day).
Our first books included, importantly, many ABC books and
ABC flash cards, which we read each many times. We especially
liked the Dr. Seuss ABC book. This led to him learning his ABCs
at an early age.
But introducing the alphabet and other mechanics of written
language was only part of the challenge. There was also
vocabulary, or the concepts language conveys. Many of our first
books were “baby concept” books, teaching things like types of
animals, colors, textures, and so forth—the usual sort of
“nonfiction” books one finds in a baby book section. We used
quite a few Priddy Books and Usborne baby books, and we did a
lot of other commercial flash cards as well (but we still had not
learned about Glenn Doman). Exposure to concepts and
vocabulary in books was surely more important though. From
early on I figured that a baby could learn basic concepts quickly
from repeated exposure to them in “baby concept” books (and of
course through encounters in the physical world as well). I think I
was right. Basically, whenever we read, I explicitly defined words I
thought were unfamiliar, in the simplest possible terms
(beginning, of course, by pointing to pictures as I said the name of
the thing in the picture). I actively sought out books that
introduced new areas of vocabulary that would expose him to as
many different areas of knowledge as I could find, at his current
level of comprehension. I am sure that this proactive and
cumulative vocabulary building is one reason why he could (I
believe) appreciate some quite advanced books at a very early age.
But more about book-reading strategy below.
When he was a year old or so we bought him the LeapFrog
"Alphabet Bus" (there are many products that do the same thing).
We noticed he was, by 18 months, pressing the buttons in
1. Early literacy activities
interesting patterns, systematically exploring. At some point we
thought to ask him, “Where’s the S?” and he would press the S.
So we discovered he could identify all his letters by 18-20 months.
(By the way, if I had known about it, we would have been using
the free Starfall.com alphabet pages, which are wonderful.)
I then started hunting around online for information about when
kids start learning the alphabet. I was surprised to learn that it was
not at all unheard-of for children to know their ABCs by the time
they are 18 months. (Age 3-5 is closer to the norm; but obviously
it depends on whether you expose your child a lot to ABC books
and the like.) Then I asked myself: if children can learn the
alphabet at such an early age, then considering that alphabet
learning is a key element in “reading readiness,” is it actually
possible for them to read at such an early age? That sounded very
unlikely to me, but that didn’t stop me from looking online for
information. I discovered through searching on YouTube that
some kids were, apparently, taught to read as babies. This was
hard for me to believe, but I was pretty impressed by the videos
that purported to be of babies reading. (This was around January
2008.) After hours of exploration there and elsewhere online, it
was hard to deny that something was going on. I wasn’t sure what
was happening and whether early reading was a good idea, even if
it was possible. Even after I decided to give it a try, for a long
time I was a skeptic, even despite the accumulating personal
evidence. Nearly three years on, I now have many fewer doubts,
but I still try to take a properly open and critical approach to the
subject.
Shortly after first seeing those YouTube videos, I decided to tell
him that the big, bold word “GO” on the cover of one of his
favorite books was read “guh-oh, go.” He loved the book in
question and started enthusiastically saying "Go!" whenever he
saw the book title. So we began with a single word, "go," which
was really easy to understand and extremely high-interest (he
already loved cars and trucks). I don’t remember this specifically,
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
but I believe that tiny success is what got me thinking that we
should try refrigerator magnets.
So, when he was around 20 months old or so, to see what else he
might be capable of, we got him a couple sets of refrigerator
magnets. We played with these. I would show him, for example,
B, A, T, and then I would say the letter sounds and have him
repeat them. Then I would put them together slowly, then a little
faster, and finally blended together in a whole word. I would
encourage him to repeat after me at different stages, but mostly it
was me explaining things to him. We stopped immediately if he
lost interest. After some time, he actually spelled out and sounded
out “dog,” in imitation of me. That convinced me that he might
be capable of learning to read, as those children I saw on
YouTube doing, so I decided to take the next steps.
2. An eclectic method of teaching a small child to read:
summary
Listening to an enormous number of books and doing various
other pre-literacy activities was essential preparation for my son to
learn to read. When I started to teach him to read at age 22
months, we did three things at once: videos, reading flashcards,
and reading books with the finger-under-the-words trick. I’ll
explain each of these briefly in this summary section, and then
elaborate in later sections.
First, the videos. When he was about 22 months, we got the first
YBCR video. My boy absolutely loved it, so then we got the full
set. He demanded to see the videos as often as possible (but we
almost never showed a video more than once a day, and my wife
slowed it down to every other day). Still, he got through the set of
five in about two months and knew all of the words cold, no
problem. Then he was bored with them.
From online conversations I got the impression that the videos
hook many little kids who try them. The videos may look
2. An eclectic method of teaching a small child to read:
summary
amateurish to you, but remember that kids might just love what
you find incredibly boring. The songs are nice, but it’s not just
that. I think the arrow moving under a word as it is being read
excites kids. It shows them that all these puzzling squiggles they
see around them, which Mommy and Daddy take so much
interest in, actually match up with words they hear spoken. Also,
the words themselves are chosen to be accessible and interesting
to babies. After the word, a short video clip is demonstrates the
meaning of the word, which is also very welcome to babies, I
think. So the production not only teaches children how to read
certain words, it clarifies the meanings of the words. I think the
reason my son and many other children are excited by these
videos is that they essentially make sense of their linguistic world—
all the written language around them—in a way they’ve never or
rarely experienced before. The videos connect together print and
spoken language, and explain very clearly and entertainingly some
of the basic concepts they have been learning. Anyway, whatever
the reason, my little boy loved them and soon learned all the
words in all the videos (a few hundred, I think).
Starting around the same time, maybe a week or two later, I
started making flashcards. At the time, I didn’t know about Glenn
Doman except, maybe, from a few articles about his methods
online. Doman arranges flash cards by subject. But I figured that
if we were going to do flash cards, I might as well arrange them
phonetically, as this would be most likely to teach him the rules of
phonics. I found some suitable-looking word lists in the back of
Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can't Read. (I had no better reason for
choosing this volume than it was what I had on hand; I couldn’t
find any comparable lists online.) It was fairly easy to make the
cards. On one side of the cards, which are about 2" by 4", I put
the word in large print, and on the other side, a picture
representing the word. I printed four cards per 8.5 x 11 page.
After about six months, we had gone through hundreds of words
and over half of Flesch’s phonetic rules. My boy gradually learned
to read (sound out) many hundreds of words. I was careful to pick
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
words, from Flesch’s word lists, that I knew he understood when
spoken, or that I could explain. I did explain quite a few, so it
became a great vocabulary lesson too—his vocabulary increased
by leaps and bounds, as he used words that were on cards. I
ended up making over 1,000 cards, and in the end he was reading
thousands than that, even before we finished using cards, about a
year later or so. (I have more details about this flashcard method
below.)
We were, of course, continuing to read a lot to him. Shortly after
starting the flashcards and videos, I started moving my finger
under the text of books as I read them. I am convinced that this
made a huge difference. He seemed to be very interested in the
text that was next to my finger, and was evidently following along
much of the time—I sometimes looked at his eyes and I could see
that he was usually following along closely (still does, at age four).
Another reason I know that he was following along is that I
occasionally misread a word, and he corrected me—even when he
was two years old. In fact, when I intentionally misread a word, he
almost always caught it and corrected me. (As he got older, he
became much faster and more impatient when correcting me; he’s
become very exacting, even about pronunciation, and always
wants to look up unusual words in a dictionary app with audio
pronunciations.)
There is actually a book, Native Reading by Timothy D. Kailing,
which advocates teaching children to read with the finger-underthe-text technique. It was Robert Titzer who stressed this both in
his materials and privately to me. I now know that it’s an old trick.
I am virtually certain that my own boy has advanced his reading
ability far beyond the videos and flashcard words by following
along with me in the text. I think it helps, also, that we steadily
increase the reading level of books, especially nighttime stories.
We read all sorts of things at meals, but before bed we started
reading chapter books; we started that regular, often difficult,
nighttime reading just before his third birthday.
2. An eclectic method of teaching a small child to read:
summary
Among many others, by his fourth birthday, we read Stuart Little,
The Trumpet of the Swan, Pinocchio, and Charlotte’s Web (all these in
the original versions) as well as the first 30 “Magic Tree House”
books. He has especially loved the “Magic Tree House” books—
my hat is off to Mary Pope Osborne for creating a formula that so
consistently results in books kids love to read and which teaches
them so much. He loves some of the more advanced books, only
in moderation, despite there being all sorts of words that I have to
explain. He listens to my explanations patiently and with evident
interest, and if I don’t explain a word he wants explained, he asks,
or just looks at me expectantly (he has an “explain it” look). I
believe these explanations are necessary in order for him to be
willing to listen to such books.
There were a couple of early literacy websites that we used a lot as
well: Starfall.com and Literactive.com. I highly recommend both.
They both have many interactive, multimedia stories and poems
that allow the student to click on word to hear their
pronunciation. This emboldened my own little boy to read these
stories to me, the way that other little readers might read the little
Bob Books (which I don’t have but have seen recommended). I
found it strange that, while he wouldn’t want to read a Dr. Seuss
book that was well within his ability, he would willingly read a
Starfall or Literactive story that was no easier. I think it was
strictly the difference in medium and our habits of using them; I
always refused to read Starfall or Literactive to him, and he was in
the habit of reading them to me, so he didn’t object. Both of these
websites are very nicely leveled, too. (They have inspired me to
design and, I hope, produce an even bigger educational site like
them, an online multimedia encyclopedia for small children. This
is currently just in the planning stages, so don’t get too excited
yet.)
Other tools we’ve used with good effect are the LeapFrog
refrigerator phonics (the 3-letter kind), and a similar 4-letter
LeapFrog device you can plug into the TV and play some
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
software with. I feel that the LeapFrog “Tag” system would have
been helpful in the early months of learning to read, but we
purchased it after he was well on his way, so it didn’t get much
use.
I think these methods and tools have together created good
results. As I first draft this section, in December 2009, he is three
years, seven months old and, based on tests I’ve found online, is
decoding text (not to say reading) at about the fourth grade level. It
has been about 21 months since he started reading his first words
on the refrigerator. Very gradually over this time, he has taken to
reading books on his own, although for the most part he just flips
through and reads pages at random. Occasionally he’ll get out a
book and read it to his mother, although he doesn’t like to read to
me too much. In all honesty, I must admit that he seems to feel
“on the spot” when he reads to me. Mostly he reads silently to
himself. We have often looked at his eyes as he is looking at the
pages, and they are making saccades across the page and from top
to bottom. He goes in phases in which he is reading all day long
and books are covering the floor around the bookcases, and other
times when he only pulls out a few, and focuses on his toys
(especially Legos) or whatever. That is not something we try to
control at all, although I have noticed that when we take down his
Lego drawers, he prefers the Legos to reading. We have an
enormous collection of books at home (on his fourth birthday, we
had four bookcases overflowing with children’s books).
Obviously, it is a hobby of mine to read to him and teach him in
other ways. I can’t think of a better, more gainful hobby, however,
and I recommend it to all parents of little children. It’s also been a
lot of fun.
I honestly can't say for certain what was most effective in teaching
him to read the way he reads now—whether it's all the bookreading, YBCR, the phonics flashcards, or even the websites like
Starfall. But it did seem that after we introduced a new phonetic
rule (i.e., started a new set of cards), he was reading better. So if I
2. An eclectic method of teaching a small child to read:
summary
17
had to pick one, it would be the phonics flashcards. But this is not
certain, because he’s made very steady progress, and he picked up
a lot of words that he couldn’t sound out based on the rules I had
“explicitly” introduced. So I think he’s learned a fair bit of
phonics “implicitly,” as Titzer says in his materials, and YBCR
certainly helped with that. I also think that following along with a
lot of text, as I moved my finger under it, was extremely
important, and quite simply being exposed to a lot of books surely
expanded his reading ability as the other methods could not. Still,
for the reason I gave, I think the phonics training with the cards
has been the single most essential element of the program, in the
sense that they best explain how he became a reader quickly.
Basically, in the space of six months, he went from being a nonreader, to reading CVC (“dog”) words almost right away, to
reading multisyllabic words, “silent e” words, etc. In another year
he was decoding at the fourth grade level or so.
Here is a table summing up the different things we did and the
function I think they might have performed in our program:
Program element
Phonics flashcards
Brief description
Showed over 1,000
hand-made
flashcards, word on
front and picture on
back; first sounded
out word for child,
then prompted child
to state word, then
gave card to child to
look at word and
picture.
Your Baby Can Read
Watched the Your
Baby
Can
Read
videos once a day at
first, then less, over
a period of about
three
months,
beginning at age 22
months.
Speculated role in the overall program
(1) By providing many examples of each of
dozens of phonics rules, grouped together,
the cards allowed my boy to infer English
phonics rules in a systematic way. (2) The
order of the cards provided an in-depth (but
painless) acquaintance with the internal
structure of words and spelling, demystifying
“the whole word.” (3) As a bonus, the very
careful, analytical attention to the sounds that
make up words caused my boy’s enunciation
to improve by leaps and bounds;
improvement in this regard began almost
immediately.
(1) Gave my boy immediate and early sense
of comprehension and mastery over a small
amount of material, increasing his motivation
to learn. (2) Effectively ingrained the difficult
but fundamental concept of letter-sound
connection. (3) Provided an introduction to
(but not systematic training in) phonics.
18
How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
Reading, pointing, Read
copious
and explaining
amounts to child
daily, from a wide
variety of books and
media,
beginning
well
before
12
months of age;
pointed at words
while
reading;
explained
the
meanings of words
in
very
simple
terms.
(1) Reading and explaining words and
concepts greatly helped to increase my boy’s
vocabulary and conceptual storehouse. This is
crucial to reading in the full-blooded sense.
(2) Pointing at words while reading
functioned as an enormous amount of
reading practice; the more words he both saw
and heard at the same time, the more he
understood written language. (3) Beyond just
vocabulary, copious reading also familiarizes a
child with grammar and pronunciation and
other elements of language.
Phonics flashcards and YBCR without reading would have meant
a much smaller vocabulary and fluency (because reading supplies
practice); phonics flashcards and reading might well have worked,
but YBCR certainly provided an excellent start; and doing just
YBCR and reading might have run the risk of inadequate exposure
to phonics, with all the well-known problems that entails. The
result was a balanced, diverse program in which I deliberately
sought both to teach and support the learning of reading, with
language found throughout the day, as part of the “environment”
—which as it happens modeled some of the solid
recommendations of Kailing’s Native Reading as well as Doman or
Titzer.
3. Phonics flashcard method
I did not teach my boy to read only with flashcards (uploaded
here, giant 122 MB zip archive of .doc files), but I do think that
they helped quite a bit. Using the word lists from Flesch’s phonics
primer, I believe these cards made it possible for my son to “crack
the phonetic code” much faster than he would have otherwise.
Soon after we started, my son did not have the problem, which
some parents have complained of, of not being able to read words
that have not been explicitly introduced. So I thought I would
share the method with you. I have little reason to claim that it is
more generally effective than any other, but we certainly seem to
3. Phonics flashcard method
have had good luck with it, and this might give you an idea of
what is possible.
I understand that the Doman method has the parent introduce
sets of words based on familiar subject matters, to keep the child’s
interest highest. That seems reasonable on first glance, especially
as a way to build vocabulary, but it is not the approach I took. I
introduced words in sets based on simplest phonetic rule to most
complex phonetic rule—that is how I would describe the word
lists I used. So we began with the short vowels (the first set
includes short-A word like mat, hat, Pam, Sam, and so forth), then
moved on to -ck, then other two-consonant blends, and then on
to more advanced phonics rules. I did not introduce words that I
could not explain with the help of the picture on the back of the
card, but on the other hand, I did not shy away from unfamiliar
words if I thought I could explain them. As a result, with this
program, his spoken vocabulary shot through the roof. He started
talking a lot more, reproducing his new words, and with markedly
better diction. Surely his speaking ability would have blossomed
during that period without such training, because the training
began after age 22 months, but I suspect his vocabulary wouldn’t
have grown as quickly, because many of the words he used, he
learned from my cards (not surprising, given that there are over
1,000 words on those cards, all together). This is just my
unscientific impression, but I believe his learning how to read
words phonetically has made a much more prolific and precise
speaker out of him.
It is worth pointing out that the age at which I started phonics
flashcards with him may have mattered quite a bit. The Doman
and Titzer methods recommend starting to teach babies as young
as, say, three or six months old. We could not have used my
method at that age, because part of this method is to have the
child say out loud the word that is written on the card. But since
we started at 22 months, I could be sure that he knew the words.
I could also be more confident that he understood the meanings
of all the words I introduced. It was also a great age to start this
19
20
How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
training because he was not nearly as independent and willful as
he would become, as a typical two- and three-year-old.
Here is how I taught my boy using the cards. The first time
through some cards (typically, I would show him 8 or 12 at a
time), I showed the card and simply read the word on it, then
sounded it out ("cat...kk..aah...tt...cat") while moving my finger
underneath the word. Then I sounded it out a little faster, and a
little faster still, then put the whole thing together. I would ask
him to say the word, too, which he was almost always game to do.
Then I turned over the card and gave it to my boy, and talked
about the picture on the back. (For verbs and prepositions, and
other words difficult to “depict,” I wrote a short sentence
including the word, and put it under a picture illustrating the
whole sentence.) Sometimes, if the word was new, I would try to
explain the meaning of the word in as simple terms as possible.
Words I felt I couldn't explain, I didn't use. Looking at the picture
was his favorite part. Sometimes he would naughtily crumple the
cards, which are just folded over strips of regular printer paper,
but we let him do that—it doesn’t make the cards less useable.
(And if I thought the crumpling was because he was frustrated or
tired, as opposed to simple fascination with scraps of paper, we’d
stop.) I was delighted that my boy generally liked the cards, and
was pretty enthusiastic about them at times. Not all children may
be this way, but other parents have reported a similar reception.
Indeed, several of them have told me that my cards were what
“did the trick” to move their children past word memorization to
full-fledged reading. Anyway, obviously, kids are all different and
of course I know that not all may take to this method.
In the first month or two, the second time I showed him a set of
cards, I would sound them out for him (“kk...aah...tt”) and ask
him, “What’s that say?” Then he’d usually tell me, and only then
I’d turn the card over. That worked pretty nicely. (This is one
reason why my precise method could not be done at the age of six
months.) After a few days of exposure, he was able to read the
cards with no hints or prompting.
3. Phonics flashcard method
We did not move onto a new set of cards until he had “mastered”
the previous set of 8 or 12, i.e., he was reading all of the cards in a
set without mistake or much of a pause (or me sounding them out
at all). There were around 25 words per set, but, again, I did not
present these all at the same time. That would have been too
much—overkill. As Doman advised, to keep it fun, sessions
should be kept short and frequent rather than long and
infrequent. Some days my son liked to look at cards through a
whole meal, or 20-30 minutes, but that was very rare; most
sessions were 5 to 10 minutes, and often they were just a few
minutes.
In the first several weeks, he began using cards with some
difficulty. He definitely had to go through a period where he was
fully mastering the general concept that written words are
matched to spoken words. Grasping this is a milestone that
reading experts make much of. I tried to make it fun for him in
whatever way I could. For example, on the back of “tell” there is a
picture of two women gossiping, one whispering into another’s
ear, and I added the caption, “Let me tell you.” Then I whispered
in his ear and said, “Let me tell you!” and he got a huge kick out
of that. Anyway, at first, he went through the cards very slowly.
But going through a few sets, he started getting the game. If he
ever had any trouble with a word, I would simply read it for him.
The aim was always to keep it low-pressure. Sometimes I asked
him sound out the words himself, but he wasn't as interested in
this, so I ask that too much. He would usually just read the word
right away, or else wait for me to sound it out, and then say it
himself. Whether sounding it out himself silently, out loud, or
having me do it, he evidently got the idea.
At one point in the first month, we had an exchange that went
like this:
"What's this?" [I point at the word "cat".]
"Cup."
21
22
How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
"Nope, look at it."
"kuh...aah...tuh...cat!"
"Good boy!"
After a month, he had totally glommed onto the idea. So then I
started out new sets of cards (and so new rules) by encouraging
him to sound out the words himself. Of course, I always gave him
the rule, e.g., saying “ ‘qu’ sounds like <sound>” and helping him
out, then praising correct answers. He got to the point where, the
first time he saw a word, he needed only a little help from me
sounding out the word. Once one of us (or me sounding out the
first bit, and him finishing it) had sounded out the word, he
immediately said it naturally, no problem.
I’ve noticed that some beginning readers read by slowly and
carefully sounding out words. This is great, and it is surely a step
toward fluent reading, but it is not itself fluent. One mother
online complained about this “problem” and asked me how she
can get her child to read more quickly. I told her that I didn’t
really know, but I think the reason we never had this problem is
that I usually did the sounding-out. If you always or usually ask
the child to do it, he or she is learning to do that and might then
do it dutifully. But if you usually do the sounding-out, I
hypothesize that the child’s mind will, like a sponge, absorb the
letter-sound connections and internalize the sounding-out. If you
let the child “tell the punchline” (put the sounds together), then
the child is practicing reading the word quickly. Obviously I don’t
know, but I speculate that that is what happened with my son.
I want to stop here to underscore that I taught him to say “that’s
enough.” If he said “that’s enough” when we were doing cards,
which he did sometimes, then we would stop instantly and not do
any more that day. If he seemed reluctant for a few days in a row,
we’d take break for a week or so. If we then came back to cards
and he still wasn’t interested, we'd take another break for a few
weeks—even a month, once or twice. Then we’d come back to
them and he’d be all interested again. In fact, he was usually quite
3. Phonics flashcard method
comfortable with the cards, and regularly asked for “new cahds.”
I can’t expect it would work that way with everyone, but it worked
that way for us. This gentle approach was inspired as much by
Glenn Doman as anyone. Quite contrary to the “pressuring
parents” stereotype, Doman emphasizes the importance of
“keeping it fun” for children, and never forcing or testing them,
and that stuck with me. Whatever you might say about Doman’s
methods, this point is (I think) broadly speaking correct and
deeply important.
After a couple months—after doing ten of the word lists, or so—
I don’t think I sounded out the words much at all after the first
time through a set. I would sound out the words the first time and
after that he'd be able to figure it out himself, i.e., he would say it.
Sometimes he would stare at a word without saying anything for a
while, then he'd just come out with it. I’m pretty sure he was
sounding it out in his head. By age 3½ he was usually reading
silently—and very fast, as far as I could tell. I watched him
reading books, and I looked at his eyes moving very quickly over
the page.
After one longer break from doing cards, a few months after we
started, we decided to review all the cards we had done before.
I think this particular review really helped a lot, because he read
much more confidently after that and for several months
afterward we occasionally went back to old cards to review. It
seems obvious that such reviews could have helped refresh and
solidify his knowledge.
Beginning several months after starting, I also started asking him
to read whole sentences, then short pages, and then whole (very
easy) books. I always made sure that he knew all the words. So he
got more practice that way, and I of course helped him and did
not insist or push. He was never eager to do this except in small
doses.
23
24
How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
About six months after he had started, he made another major
advance. He started sight-reading many of the new cards, on the
first try, even for rules he hadn't been introduced to before. If he
couldn’t get a word, I started sounding it out for him, then he
would finish after I slowly sounded out one or two letters. At this
point he could decode well over 1,000 words, probably more like
5,000. By the time we were to word lists #20 to #30 or so (over
halfway through), I almost never had to sound out words in
advance, he was simply reading brand new words, illustrating
brand new phonetic principles, without me saying or helping
much at all. I would just explain the new rule, maybe just giving
an example or two—and maybe even this wasn’t necessary—and
then he would just read the new words perfectly the first time. But
we kept doing the cards anyway, to solidify his phonetic
understanding. I was glad we did that solidifying work, by the way;
I think it helped.
As his decoding skills improved, his interest in the cards waned,
and we gradually tapered off using them. The last time I was
regularly making new cards was a little over a year after we started.
Since then I did make one set of cards, in the interest of
completeness, but I felt rather silly doing it, because he knew the
words perfectly well—it was pretty pointless. So that’s why I
never finished going through all of Flesch’s word lists. I never
made cards for the last 3-4 lists or so. If someone else wants to
finish my work, I’ll be happy to upload it.
There are some who might still be skeptical of my claims, and
insist that my son was not learning phonics and was only
memorizing individual words. After all, I did show and read to
him over 1,000 cards. I have encountered such skepticism in
several places (an example); the toddler brain is supposed to be
incapable of learning phonics, so apparently we did the impossible.
In response, I want to emphasize that while he often recognized
words immediately, without sounding them out, we saw all sorts
of evidence that he was indeed sounding out words from the
earliest months of his reading. His first words read were words
4. Your Baby Can Read
that we spelled and sounded out together with refrigerator
magnets. A few months later, we sometimes heard him explicitly
sound out parts of words, but not usually entire words. I think he
found that tedious. If I asked him to (I only rarely did), he might
impatiently sound out an entire word, which he did pretty well.
He sometimes read unfamiliar and not-perfectly-phonetic or more
advanced-phonetic words incorrectly, according to the simpler
phonetic rules he’d learned, which means he must have been
sounding the words out silently. Since those early months, his
advanced reading ability, and occasional phonetic rule-following
miscues (which go on to this day—as a 4-year-old he quickly
misread the name “Thomson” with a θ sound), makes it even
more obvious that he has “cracked the code” of phonics.
Frankly, the whole process was pretty painless, and I recommend
it. But I realize, and you should know, that I am not a reading
expert. I hope the above account makes it more plausible, if
you’ve had doubts, that it is possible to teach small children
phonics. If your child is old enough (obviously, my particular
method can’t be used with kids whose mouths/voices can’t make
the sounds) and you don’t have any philosophical objections, try it
and see if you have similar luck. Of course, your mileage may
vary. I’m always gratified to hear from those who have used my
cards and had an experience similar to ours. My wife, who
patiently witnessed the whole process, was totally convinced that
it was my cards, more than Your Baby Can Read or anything else,
that taught our son to decode written language.
4. Your Baby Can Read
Note: I do not have any financial stake in the companies that sell Your Baby
Can Read. I’ve conversed with Dr. Titzer but as a highly interested and
curious customer, and later, to help organize an independent study of the
efficacy of the videos. He also commented on this essay before I posted it. I do
not maintain that one must spend $200 on videos to teach a small child to
learn to read. If you can’t handle the expense, there are other ways to do it.
You might be able to find copies at the library. Also, there are other DVD
25
26
How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
and software programs that purport to do something similar, such as the
Brillkids.com “Little Reader” (which I’ve used—it’s a good software
implementation of the Doman method), and the Monki See Monki Do and
Tweedlewink programs (which I haven’t seen yet, but which are widely touted
by the interested community). Finally, there is the Doman method itself, which
can require a lot of work out of the parent, but which is free. Some parents use
PowerPoint presentations to achieve a similar effect to Doman’s “bits” cards,
and quite a few of such PowerPoint presentations are available for free online,
for example at BrillKids.com.
At about the same time I started making cards (when my son was
22 months), we started watching the Your Baby Can Read videos.
This is a series of five DVDs, marketed for the use of children
through age five, with accompanying media like some very nice
flashcards and books. We bought the first DVD and my son
absolutely loved it. Then we got the others, and he went through
them all in about three months or so. For the first few months he
was desperate to watch them as much as possible. Just before his
second birthday, he was constantly saying “read!” and later on
“your baby can read!”
The videos basically consist of printed words in very large font
size, spoken while an arrow moves under the word, followed by
a moving picture of the thing that it is a word of, displayed while
a spoken sentence or two using the word describes what’s
happening in the video. For a few minutes at the end of the
videos, there is some attempt to teach some words in an order
that better conduces to phonetic understanding. But I’m
convinced these videos helped him to learn to the basics of word
decoding. After about two months, we had gone through the
whole set of DVDs, and after four months, he could almost
instantly read all the words on all the accompanying cards (very
similar to the cards I make for him, and also similar to Doman
flashcards).
For us, these videos work as billed. My son was able, with written
words alone as a cue, to recognize and repeat the words out loud.
4. Your Baby Can Read
I was very interested in the fact that, in the first few months, he
was able to read the YBCR words much more quickly, and with
less difficulty, than the words I was teaching more systematically
with my phonics flashcards, even though the words on my cards
were often much simpler (“dog” and “kick” versus “elephant”
and “hippopotamus”). But this advantage dropped away after six
months or so, and after that he was able to read unfamiliar words
on new cards very quickly as well.
For a while I thought that the DVDs were only teaching the
words on the DVDs, and did not really help my son to learn
anything else about reading. But I later came to the opinion,
which I am still not absolutely sure about, that they did help him
to learn some phonics patterns. This is a claim that Titzer himself
makes, and which Doman has made as well on behalf of his own
program. They both say that a child basically gets experience
through multiple examples of phonetic rules, and then naturally
infers the rules by induction. That this should be possible need
not be too surprising, considering that this is a well-documented
phenomenon for slightly older children (ages 3-5; see Durkin’s
Children Who Read Early) and that babies naturally learn many
other linguistic rules, such as how words are chunked (where one
word ends and another begins) and the basic rules of grammar,
inductively and without explicit instruction. In any case, I think
the videos probably made my son much more comfortable with
the whole notion of matching sounds to written marks. Learning
to recognize long words like “hippopotamus” must also give a
child some confidence, and that’s important.
The above analysis is entirely speculation, but I have to doubt that
the YBCR videos, by themselves and without follow-up in the form of
much reading (at the very least), would give most children the
ability to read. Studies soon to appear may show something
different, and Titzer privately expressed thoughtful disagreement
with me on this. Among other things, he wrote me, “We have
thousands of parents who have written to say that their babies
and toddlers learned to read from using YBCR. Only a few of
27
28
How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
these parents ever mention that they did additional reading
activities.” But surely, any parent who is motivated to show YBCR
is probably also going to be motivated to do a fair bit of reading
as well, and possibly some other language-building activities. Of
course they should, anyway.
In correspondence, Timothy Kailing (the advocate of pointingwhile-reading) made an interesting, related point. I can’t say it any
better than he did:
While many children can learn phonetic rules implicitly
from a whole word approach, I think, if clumsily taught,
some children could indeed at least go through a stage
where they are “barking” at words [reading without
comprehension], as you called it. My main concern with
videos and flashcards is that it could, for some children,
encourage an idiogrammatic [whole symbol-based, not
phonics-based] level of understanding that, while probably
transitory and not harmful for most children, is certainly
quite independent from the sort of understanding that leads
to fluent reading. Using a small set of words or the same
video over and over, in a highly stylized setting, increases
my concern. Your emphasis on how you used a variety of
reading material, methods, and various sorts of literate play
are, to me, very important points. And in this context, I
have no concerns with flashcards and videos as part of the
mix.
5. Reading books
As I said, about 3-4 months after we started teaching him to read,
my son could and occasionally did read short, simple, phonicsbased stories by himself. It was still amazing to me that, at age 26
months or so, he was able to read through, for example, the entire
20 or so pages of Blue Train, Green Train, a very simple Thomas the
Tank Engine story (not an original one; we’ve read many of the
originals from a fat anthology, too; highly recommended!). He had
5. Reading books
most of those first stories read to him many times in the past, so
for many of them there was a question how much he had simply
memorized the stories. But we also used the wonderful (and free)
Starfall.com website and discovered that he could, with some help
and prompting, get through some brand new stories from that site
as well. I also noticed that he was more than capable of reading
brand new whole sentences and long phrases that I wrote out, if
he was familiar with the words. But within a few months he was
also sounding out unfamiliar words, phonetically similar to old
words. This demonstrates that, plainly, he was neither merely
memorizing the sequence of words in the stories he read, nor
merely recalling the shape of the words without decoding them.
But the best reading practice he got from whole books did not
take the form of him reading books to me, but the other way
around.
Maybe more than the phonics flashcards or YBCR, I attribute our
success in getting our son to read at an extremely young age to the
fact that in his first three years, we sat down and read with him
daily, usually many toddler books per day. While the phonics
flashcards taught him phonics rules, and YBCR completely
ingrained the letter-sound connections and gave him the
confidence that he could read some words, it was my regular
reading to him that helped us to practice reading. That is, every
time we read a book, he was practicing his own reading. How?
After his 24th month or so, I made a point of putting my finger
under the word I was reading, so he could follow along with the
text if he wished. We still do this; it’s no trouble for me, and he
still learns from it. This simple practice also reinforced the idea
that everything I was saying could be found in those words on the
page. I think this has reinforced already-learned words and
perhaps even taught him some common words like “the.” I never
had to teach him “sight words” or “Dolch words” using
flashcards or any other explicit way. (Mind you, some supposed
29
30
How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
“sight words” turn out to be phonetic, if you review a full
complement of phonics rules.)
This is the trick touted by Kailing in Native Reading, and even
appears in To Kill a Mockingbird, where Scout says:
I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's
moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at
them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news
of the day, Bills To Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of
Lorenzo Dow—anything Atticus happened to be reading
when I crawled into his lap every night.
Here is another trick I used quite a bit. When I got to a simple
phrase or sentence in a book, particularly one made of words that
I knew he knew, I stopped and if necessary (it usually wasn’t)
prompted him to finish, which he usually did without too much
trouble. After he turned three or so, however, he caught on to my
“trick” and would not finish reading sentences, unless I asked him
to explicitly, which I then did only very infrequently.
We have deliberately avoided many of the oversimplified “easy
reader” books, unless we know that he likes a series, or it looks
interesting. We don’t have the Dick-and-Jane books, or the many
artificial-sounding books written specifically as part of phonics or
basal reading programs. We tried a few, but he did not seem very
interested. Most of such books are simply not very interesting to
children, I believe, and asking children to read from those books
make reading seem boring.
I don’t mean to say that we didn’t use any beginner books, written
specifically for their phonetic ease. The Starfall online books are
this way, and they aren’t “great literature,” but my boy loved them
probably because of the moving pictures and I think also the
sound-out-the-word feature. So I’m not doctrinaire on this point;
I go with whatever my boy seems to like. Still, rather than having
him read only from the more boring, carefully-leveled phonics or
5. Reading books
basal readers, I much prefer my approach, which is to ask him
(occasionally, not too much) to read those words, phrases, or
sentences that he can read in a book that he already likes.
There are several advantages to this. I think it gave him a sense of
accomplishment, and let him understand that the words on the
cards could be found in books he liked. Reading words familiar
from my phonics flashcards in the context of a familiar, well-liked
story no doubt helped improve overall facility. I also could see
how, as we went through more and more phonetic rules, we could
read more and more of the words in the books he already had. I
suspect this was behind his requests for “new cards” and the
interest he took in cards: the cards were the keys that unlocked his
beloved books, perhaps. (I say this poetically, but there is a
testable hypothesis here.)
However the books were chosen, it seems extremely important
that we combined the cards with large amounts of ongoing
reading. The books without the cards would almost certainly not
have taught him to read (however positive the experience would
have been otherwise), and the cards without the books would
have been absolutely hopeless, because otherwise he would not
have the interest in and familiarity with all those words.
When he was one and two years old, his favorite books included
Curious George and Madeline. Our first chapter book was Winnie-thePooh which we read sometime when he was two. Then, just before
his third birthday, we started reading chapter books more
consistently. Stuart Little was one of the first—I was prepared to
put it aside for a few years, and I was amazed that it held his
attention. We also read Charlotte’s Web, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, the
My Father’s Dragon series, and The Boxcar Children. Later on, we
were sucked into the Magic Tree House books. Then we read
Little House in the Big Woods, Charlotte’s Web again, Pinocchio twice in
a row, and The Trumpet of the Swan twice.
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
Though his reading and comprehension level are clearly advanced,
we also still read quite a few picture and story books of various
kinds. We have also read a tremendous amount of nonfiction. His
favorite topics here have included trucks and other heavy
machinery, animals (for a while, it was all “muddy pigs” all the
time, inspired by Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web), electricity, and
various other topics. But we have read books about virtually every
general nonfiction subject accessible to his age. In addition to our
own large and growing book collection, we made occasional trips
to the library as well.
I say all this not (or not merely) to brag, but to point out that you
probably cannot expect results similar to those we got from just
phonics flashcards or just YBCR without being immersed in
language that is constantly broadening the child’s vocabulary, i.e.,
by a lot of reading. According to research I can’t put my hands on
just now, written language has a far greater range of words than
spoken language, and even the speech of well-educated people
uses a surprisingly smaller range of words than fairly simple
books. If you want your child to be able to read many words with
good comprehension, he or she must be exposed to those words
in the first place.
As I’ll explain more further down, this is a point that many
reading experts (Jane Healy would be just one example) hammer
on: reading without comprehension is not really reading. I can’t
disagree. I simply do not draw the conclusion that, therefore,
children cannot or should not start learning to read until they have
“naturally” absorbed more vocabulary. What if, as in our case, by
age two a child has been exposed to many hundreds of books
about many different topics? What if one takes other steps to
improve their conceptual storehouse? Then understanding the
typical toddler book is not much of a challenge.
Just one caution, again from personal experience: mix some easy
books in with the more difficult ones. It is a bad idea always to
“push the envelope” in terms of the child’s reading level. Reading
5. Reading books
only above a child’s level can turn her off to books. Reading a
mixture of books, some that are very easy, some not-too-hardand-not-too-easy, and some relatively difficult is the best way to
keep up a lively interest in reading, we found. Say your child is
only moderately challenged when you read him Curious George.
Probably, most of his reading should be at about that level. But
he’ll probably still be entertained, comforted, and helped by
reading much easier books like the Biscuit books. He will probably
also appreciate some, but not a lot, of more advanced material
such as Winnie-the-Pooh or the Magic Tree House series. We
generally read the more advanced stuff at bedtime—I don’t know
if that’s a good idea but that’s the habit we got into. Some
mothers I’ve talked to online theorized that chapter books are
easier to read at bedtime because children are more willing to read
more difficult stuff in order to put off bedtime. We didn’t even
start a regular bedtime story until we started seriously on chapter
books, which wasn’t until just before his third birthday.
I’ve occasionally come across parents who express frustration that
their children don’t want to read to. It’s hard to say what the
problem is without more specific information, but what could be
causing it is a lack of book choices that are acceptable to the child.
Just like adults, small children—especially after the age of 2 to 3—
have definite tastes in books, and they can be in the mood for one
book at one time and a different one at another. So it is
important, crucial in fact, to have a good supply of unread (or
under-read) books on hand at all times, so you can give your child
a large range of choices.
The way we usually do it is rather simple: I propose a book. If
he’s game he’ll show interest in my choice. If not, I offer him a
choice of 4-5 more books, and usually he’ll choose one of those.
He usually wants to read something. You might worry that your
child might never want to read certain expensive books you’ve
bought or never want to study some topic you think is important
for him to know about. Our experience, however, is that books he
says “no” to at one time, he’ll usually say “yes” to at some later
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
time. The percentage of books that I’ve bought or checked out
for him that he always says “no” to is around 5-10%. (The
percentage is higher for chapter books, but that doesn’t keep us
from reading high-quality chapter books every evening; see the list
at the end of this essay.) Unaccountably, there are some books
that he’s decided he just doesn’t like. That’s OK with me.
If you take this advice, in time your child will surely learn that
there’s always something interesting out there to read. Here are
some other tricks we’ve used. Reading time is, famously, closeness
time, and this is important. Sit the child in your lap or right next
to you in a comfy couch or chair, and there will be less resistance
than if you are sitting in front of the child, librarian style. Also,
read at mealtimes, when you have a “captive audience”; this is
when we get a lot of our reading done. Finally, of course, don’t
read in a monotone or with a sing-song voice, read like you mean
it, conversationally or dramatically. Vary your voice; read like you
understand and care what you are reading about.
It also helps to read with the notion that you are not just sounding
out the words, but conveying meaning; I think of myself as not so
much reading as explaining the text to the child. The difficulty of
vocabulary can turn a child off to more advanced books. But I
was able to make otherwise difficult books accessible to my son.
I pointed at any illustrative pictures whenever I thought he may
not understand a word. Especially at age two and later, when
vocabulary is starting to get off the ground floor, I offered very
simple definitions of difficult words. Certainly, children can pick
up a lot from context. But I am also sure, based on my experience
of explaining hundreds of words to my boy and then watching
him use those words immediately in conversation, that giving
simple verbal glosses of words has greatly increased his
vocabulary. At first you might find yourself fumbling for words of
explanation, but the more child-accessible definitions you offer,
the easier it becomes to formulate them “on the fly,” so you don’t
have to stop reading for long. Sometimes just one or two words, a
vague synonym, will help. By using such tricks, we were able to
6. Concept-building: presentations, the Doman method, and
OPD
read Pinocchio (in this edition, chock-full of pictures), which has a
lot of quite difficult vocabulary words. I explained a lot of those
words on the fly, and my boy liked the story enough not to be
impatient with the explanations. In fact, he came to expect such
explanations and seemed to find them interesting, if they weren’t
too long. As to the book itself, he liked it so much that we
immediately went back to read it a second time, even though it’s
quite long for a children’s book. (I think it appealed to the
“naughty little boy” in him; see my review.)
6. Concept-building: presentations, the Doman
method, and OPD
About six months after I started teaching my son to read, I started
showing him PowerPoint presentations that I made. Over the
course of the next 18 months or so, I made around 150
presentations. I think this increased his general knowledge and
vocabulary and also helped with his reading ability.
But first, some background. After starting on phonics flashcards
and YBCR, I started reading more on- and offline about Glenn
Doman and his method. It was Doman’s notion of flashcards and
other online presentations I had seen, that inspired the
presentations I started about six months after we started learning
to read. I am not going to go into much detail about Doman’s
methods, because there are many explanations online, and an indepth explanation would make this already too-long essay even
longer.
Beginning in the 1950s, Glenn Doman, originally trained as a
physical therapist, turned to therapy for brain-damaged children.
Later he applied his teaching therapies to normal children. He
became convinced that every child has genius potential, and that
society is dreadfully under-serving its children by not tapping into
that potential. This led to a series of books with titles like How to
Teach Your Baby to Read and How to Give Your Baby Encyclopedic
Knowledge. The latter title spoke to my interests in encyclopedias
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
and knowledge, so I read it shortly after I began teaching my son
to read. I found Doman’s writing to be over-the-top and his
claims exaggerated, but, considering the surprising examples of
baby reading and other kinds of precocious development, I still
found the Doman method intriguing.
The method involves several stages of development. In the first
stage, the teacher sits a baby down (beginning around six months
of age) and flashes very large-type, red-colored words on large
cards (one word filling up a whole card the size of a piece of
notebook paper), one per second, while saying the word in a
joyful tone of voice. It is crucial, says Doman, that this flashing
should not be done unless a baby is fully engaged and alert. Many
accounts I’ve read say that babies actually like this quite a bit. In a
later stage (or maybe it is just an alternate way of doing the first
stage), after the word, a large, clear picture of the thing the word
describes is shown. So, for example, one might print the word
“dog” in very big red letters on a large piece of card paper, and
then paste a picture of a dog (just the dog, nothing else) on
another card. One prepares 5-10 of such word-picture pairs, and
then shows them in quick succession to the baby. This “flashing”
is supposed to be done something like three times a day, and can
be accomplished in less than a minute, total. The next stage
involves not just saying the word, but expressing some pithy facts
about the object named. So you might first show and state the
word “dog,” and then, while showing a picture or two of dogs,
you might say, “Dogs bark to scare off people and animals they
don’t know, or when excited.”
Doman recommended making paper flashcards, but for the 21st
century, his method has been converted into a digital form by
various active parents, such as Perla Adams at
theclassicalmommy.com (Adams later became disillusioned with
the Doman method because of its emphasis on the whole word
method; you can read her insights on her site) and the people at
BrillKids.com, in PowerPoint presentations and other media.
BrillKids has proprietary software. Some people make videos that
6. Concept-building: presentations, the Doman method, and
OPD
can be used a similar way, and apps are the latest way to deliver
such content. Good images can be found very quickly via Google
Image Search, Flickr, and other sources, and then simply dragged
on to PowerPoint slides.
I proceeded to download dozens of PowerPoint presentations
made by parents who were following Doman’s methods; my son
ate these up. I soon started making many presentations myself,
about a wide assortment of topics—not just the ones
recommended by Doman. I decided to put whole sentences (or
parts of sentences) on most presentations, and finding an
appropriate image for each “fact” I wanted to teach. (But I never
used too much text, and always tried to use words that I thought
my son would know.) In this way, we covered topics as diverse as
zoo animals, geography, art, music, space, physical science, and
many other topics. For the same purpose, we also spent a fair bit
of time in the library when he was two years old, looking for what
librarians call “concept books.” A concept book is basically a very
simply-written book meant to introduce some basic concept, like
the numbers, alphabet, seasons, colors, and other of the simplest
concepts. My own presentations were essentially concept books
put onto PowerPoint presentations. I still make presentations
occasionally.
My son was always game to look at new presentations, and
especially when he was two, he would look at the presentations
over and over again. But later on, there were some he didn’t seem
to like so much; I didn’t insist on showing them, of course. Over
the course of several months, anyway, we looked even at the less
attractive ones several times, and he showed every sign of picking
up a lot of knowledge that way. Sometimes he would complain
and cry loudly if we stopped looking at them before he was ready
to stop, and he had his favorites that he insisted on looking at
over and over and over—just as with ordinary books.
You might quite justifiably wonder what the point of preparing
amateur presentations of this sort is, when the same information
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
is to be found, more professionally produced, in children’s books.
To be sure, we did read both books and presentations a lot, though
we spent much more time on regular books than on
presentations.
But presentations of the sort I make are similar to Doman-style
presentations in that they serve two functions that ordinary books
do not serve so well. The first is that they can help to teach a
small child to read. By using large print that pops out at the child
(Doman recommends using bold red type), by using just one or
few words per page, and by clearly separating text from pictures,
such presentations make it easier for children to pay attention to
the words. Of course, some baby books, and easiest readers and
concept books, are written this way; probably, more should be.
Somebody ought to create a giant paper encyclopedia made this
way. If done well, I think it would sell like hotcakes, and
potentially teach a generation of kids to read better.
The second function is that these presentations are primarily
aimed at teaching concepts and vocabulary, or those facts that are
so basic that they arguably form part of our concept of a thing.
The latter—“teaching concepts and vocabulary”—probably
sounds so insufferably dry that you can’t imagine a child not
having to be forced to view such presentations. But that’s just not
the case. Here I return to Doman. He insists over and over that
babies love to learn, that they would rather learn than eat, etc. I
doubt that’s always their top priority, but thinking of small
children as deeply interested learners does seem to explain a lot of
their behavior, and is supported by science; see Alison Gopnik’s
The Philosophical Baby for reports on supporting research. And as it
turns out, my son loves some of the most factual presentations I
made on the driest-seeming subjects—would you believe
chemistry and electricity? But also pigs in mud.
Along the same lines, one of my son’s favorite books has been the
Oxford Picture Dictionary, which he calls “op-ed” because the large
letters “OPD” appear on the cover. We have been reading it
6. Concept-building: presentations, the Doman method, and
OPD
through, systematically, just a few pages (at most) at a time, for
something like two years. He frequently requests it and hasn’t yet
gotten tired of it. This book is intended to help teach English as a
second language, but I find it is excellent for teaching concepts
and vocabulary to learners of English as a first language. I point to
a word, say its name, then point to the picture that the word refers
to (if necessary—often, the word is just below the picture). Then,
if I think the meaning of the word is unclear to my son, I give it a
quick gloss I think he can understand. Sometimes this leads to
questions and further explanations. In this way I have explained
basic concepts about practically everything about the world. For
some reason, he strongly prefers OPD to the children’s picture
dictionaries and encyclopedias we have found, and we have
several. (By “strongly prefers” I mean that he frequently requests
OPD, and he basically can’t stand looking at the others. I can’t
figure out why.)
I would be remiss if I did not mention that my wife, a language
teacher from another country, speaks another language exclusively
to my son, so he is bilingual (without much “formal” training; but
we’ve done some Rosetta Stone and reading in that language, and
he can read some words in that language as well). So he is learning
words for the same concepts in two languages. He not
infrequently uses a word in the other language if he does not
know it as well in English. I sometimes have to ask him what the
word means in English, and he is sometimes able to give me a
translation.
I believe that having been taught concepts and vocabulary
explicitly—even if it is unfashionable to do so—has greatly
improved my son’s abilities to read, to comprehend written
language, and to speak well. While being able to read (meaning,
here, decode text) is an important tool for developing vocabulary,
comprehension, and speaking abilities, being introduced directly
to concepts, with clear language and pictures, really helps as well.
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
I should add in all honesty that I personally have no proof of these
claims. It may have been more efficient in teaching these language
skills to do something else than to teach concepts and vocabulary
explicitly, and let him learn vocabulary more often from context. I
would be delighted to discover that some researchers had taken
up the question of the efficacy of Doman-style presentations
and/or similar media (PowerPoints and concept books) for the
extremely young, but I am not aware of any studies. At least I can
say that it does not seem to have been an entire waste of time. I
have noticed my son using many of the words and facts he was
taught from presentations, and I trust that whenever he is engaged
with some material, then he is learning. When he is not engaged
with the material, we quickly stop and move on to something else.
7. Other educational activities that helped with
learning to read
There are a wide variety of other educational activities that have
supported my son’s ability to read (and learn more generally). In
no particular order, here is an extensive but still incomplete list.
 For a period of many months, I told him what different
road signs said, and I also occasionally asked him to read
some signs. Pretty soon he was offering the information
himself. He took a great interest in signs and so I made a
series of PowerPoint presentations about them. Reading
store signs and other signs became one of his favorite
pastimes when we were in the car; he still points out and
reads the more unusual signs.
 On several occasions when he was 2 and 3, I wrote down
his stories; usually it was just him narrating something that
happened to him, but sometimes it was wholly made-up.
He always got a big kick out of reading his own words.
 When he was three, I think inspired in part by my writing
down his stories, he took to telling me stories at bedtime.
7. Other educational activities that helped with learning to read
I encouraged this and we did it for many months. His
stories used all sorts of bizarre and imaginative remixtures
of plots, characters, and objects picked up from his reading
and experience.
 I let him play on the computer a fair bit, so he can use the
mouse well and hunt-and-peck a few words. When he was
two and three, I often started my word processing program
and increased the font size to something really big, then he
would just bang on the keyboard, but sometimes he would
write out a few words with my help. He still practices his
reading abilities as he navigates the Internet; usually I get
him onto some educational website, then sometimes he
takes over. More than once, all by himself, he clicked my
WatchKnow.org favorites bar link, then typed in “pig” in
the search engine. Note, by age 4 he still had not learned
how to write (he could write only a few easy capital letters).
 One thing that made a few books more interesting for my
son was to use PowerPoint presentations explaining
vocabulary from those books. We did this with Charlotte’s
Web and a few others.
 We regularly look at a globe placed near the dining room
table. We play “How about Right There”: once, when he
was two, I said, “Let’s imagine we could take a trip
anywhere in the world, but we didn’t know where we were
going to go. We could go…how about…right there!” As I
said this I would spin the globe, without looking at it, and
put my finger randomly somewhere on it. Then I would say
something about where we landed. My son got a big kick
out of that, and requested to play it again and again. He still
does; on his fourth birthday we were still playing it pretty
often. We also looked at maps and atlases a lot.
 At our local Wal-Mart type store we bought several sets of
24-piece puzzles, each puzzle showing a different topic.
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
There is writing (labels) on these puzzles, and putting them
together, usually with some help, has (among other things)
reinforced many concepts as well as his reading skills. We
also did some map puzzles and, again, reading skills were
both used and reinforced in doing these.
 When my son was a toddler, we went over nursery rhymes
and songs repeatedly, so much so that he memorized many
of them.
 My son’s current favorite toy is Legos, which he’s learned
how to play very well. I went a little beyond the call of duty
in making sets of organizer drawers, with labels on them,
for his Legos. To my surprise, he very quickly memorized
the labels, and knows where all the pieces go. I am sure that
this is good practice not just for reading but for conceptualanalytical ability as well. But it certainly took a (mostly fun)
time investment on my part. We also have spent many
hours with a Radio Shack “Electronic Snap Kit,” which
involves reading and interpreting some instructions (and
learning about electronic circuits and components).
 I don’t know how much it has helped with reading, but
certainly he has been exposed to new vocabulary and
concepts by helping me do half of the experiments out of
Chemistry for Every Kid. We read all of this together. Since it
is all in support of gee-whiz experiments, he usually pays
excellent attention to the explanations, even though he
probably understands only half of the text. I try as best as I
can to explain simply the scientific jargon and explanations
in the text.
 Just since spring 2010 we’ve been doing a lot of new apps
on the iPod touch and iPad. Some of these seem quite
good for reading development, such as dot-to-dot games
that reinforce the alphabet, touch-writing tutors that teach
handwriting and spelling, a Speak-and-Spell emulator, etc.
43
8. Plans for our second child
While I was working on this essay, our family added another boy.
In his first month, I started showing baby #2 a variety of iPad
baby apps. I have also started reading the same baby board books
to him that I used with our first boy. As long as baby is paying
attention (i.e., gazing with interest at the book or screen), and is
not getting too excited—that is a sign of overstimulation, at this
age—I show him stuff for as long as he wants. This is usually not
longer than five minutes. I also show him some music apps,
which have the added benefit of calming down a fussy baby.
Will I do anything different with baby #2? Not a lot—mainly I’ll
just do more of the same, as long as he is interested and engaged.
We’ll do more alphabet books. We’ll get a half-dozen more and
read them often.
I am sure we will use YBCR, probably beginning around six
months—or when he can focus and be interested in what’s going
on on TV. While I do worry that he’ll learn to read using a whole
word method (and as a result, he might be less able to understand
phonics), I’m not very worried about this. When I am satisfied that
he can understand the sounds the letters make, and once he can
speak, I’ll try using my phonics flash cards using the method I
used with my first. When this will be depends on him, of course.
We’ll also do more of what Doman calls “encyclopedic
knowledge.” This will take the form of sets of pictures (and
names to go with them) of different categories of things. By the
time he’s ready for them, I should have started making a lot more
of my own presentations, which have simple sentences, beyond
single words. I’m especially excited about this. WatchKnow’s
funder, who pays for my work, is enthusiastic in support of what
will essentially be a massive children’s encyclopedia, covering
every topic that can be taught (gainfully) to young children. I look
forward not only to writing this, even more I look forward to
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
using the results with my two boys. I will probably be blogging
about our progress at larrysanger.org.
PART 2: teaching the very young to read—
a defense
I now switch gears. While our story perhaps carries various
implicit lessons, any critical-thinking person who is very new to
the whole subject of very early reading is still apt to have many
questions and objections. A friend told me, “I don’t know what
the point of this essay is; all you have to do is show your video to
the world.” But I disagree. When skeptics view the video, most of
them say, “But your kid just has smart genes.” This makes it easy
to ignore the possibility that, in fact, all children have a similar
potential.
In the following, I have attempted to state and honestly deal with
every problem and criticism I have come across, or could think
of, about teaching babies and toddlers to read. But, again, I don’t
pretend to have the final word.
It is important for researchers to note I am beginning with the
easiest-to-respond-to criticisms. I do not get to the sort of
criticisms articulated by the more sophisticated, well-informed
critics until Section 7 or so. For example, not until Section 9 do I
address the notion that toddlers and preschoolers are not
developmentally ready to benefit from reading, because they do
not understand what they are reading well enough. This objection
must be taken seriously, and is much more sophisticated than the
relatively simple objection that toddlers will never do anything
more than “word calling,” a problem relatively quickly dispatched
46
How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
in Section 1. And it isn’t until Section 12 that I get to another
important objection: that early reading has no long-term
advantages. I spend a long time on that one.
So I begin with a defense of the general notion that it is possible
to teach tiny tots to read in the first place. You might be surprised
to learn that, in my opinion, this is pretty much the easiest thing
to establish on the subject.
1. Yes, it is possible
This must be a joke or scam. It isn’t really possible to teach babies
and toddlers to read, right?
If you just did not know that it is possible to teach one-year-olds
to learn to recognize individual written words, you may be in for a
shock. The quickest way to convince yourself that this is at least
plausible is to watch some YouTube videos. Try this YouTube
search, then this one, then this one. Go ahead, watch some videos
now, if you haven’t done so already; it will place the rest of this
essay in an essential context. If you aren’t familiar with such videos
or have never seen a very small child read, the rest of this is
probably going to sound bizarre, and you probably won’t
understand it.
Are you convinced? If you weren’t convinced before, you’re
probably not convinced now. You are probably just skeptical or
confused now. That’s understandable; it was my first reaction,
too. The whole idea of teaching babies to read sounds ridiculous
at first. So let’s reply to a few doubts that might spring to mind.
And first things first:
Isn’t this just a dishonest trick?
Nope. Nobody’s whispering the words to the kids, for instance.
The videos aren’t dubbed over. And the kids really are that young.
There’s at least one video of a 9-month-old girl who, for example,
touches her toes when she sees the word “toes.” Quite a few sub-
1. Yes, it is possible
one-year-olds have learned to do that sort of stuff. The sheer
quantity of the videos should be enough to establish that it’s not
just trickery. I mean, if you don’t want to take my word for it that
it’s not trickery, just watch a whole bunch of videos and I think
you’ll find your doubts, on that score anyway, disappearing.
Aren’t the children just memorizing the order of words?
If a tot has learned the words properly, as many of these tots
have, the words can be presented on flash cards and presented in
any order you wish. They aren’t just memorizing the order of the
words. Again, I have long experience of this with my own boy,
and many others appear to have similar experience. (I found it
hard to keep our flash cards in any order, actually, as parents with
little kids will be able to understand.)
Haven’t the little book-readers just memorized the books? Lots of
non-readers do that, you know.
Some of the videos purport to show tiny book-readers. You might
suspect that the tots aren’t reading, that they’ve just memorized
the books, as in this case. Of course, that’s impressive too; their
parents are rightly proud of their children’s ability to memorize.
Also, of course people put up videos of their children cutely
“pretending” to read. So how do you know the children are really
reading?
First, just look at some other videos in those video searches. In a
number of them, it sure doesn’t look like a child has memorized
the book, like (just to take one of many examples) this one.
Finally, if you can take my word for it, then just know that my
own boy was reading his first books (very simple ones, like Go Dog
Go) shortly after his second birthday, and by age 29 months he
was reading Little Bear. Have a look at our video, if you haven’t
yet. I could show him brand new books, or write brand new
sentences for him, and he could read them out loud with little
trouble. The clips from when my boy was 3½ should be a little
more convincing—he read the bit about two- and three-stroke
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
engines from a book that he selected at random, and I don’t think
he had ever read that question or answer before.
Anyway, in many of these videos, those little kids really are
decoding the words, in response to seeing the text on the page. In
other words, they’re reading (in that sense). Again, watch a bunch
of videos and you’ll probably be able to entertain seriously the
proposition that they aren’t just memorizing the book. At least
that’s the conclusion I came to, although I admit I didn’t become
100% convinced of it until I saw my own little boy doing the
same.
If the children really are decoding the text so early, aren’t they
hyperlexic?
Hyperlexia is a disorder in which a very young child
spontaneously picks up how to decode written language, but
without comprehension. It is associated with autism. I’ve never
come across any discussion or video online that suggests that one
can induce hyperlexia by deliberately teaching a tiny tot how to read
in the ways described here. In my many conversations online with
other parents (mostly mothers) who have taught their small
children to read, none of the parents with early-reading tots have
said that their children were diagnosed hyperlexic. We naturally
care a lot about our children and if we had any fears on this score,
we would have them checked out, and at least some of us would
share the information with others.
(By the way, two small online communities I frequent, the
BrillKids.com Forum and the TeachYourBabyToRead Yahoo!
group, are woefully underserved by the research community—in
my experience, not one reading researcher or early education
expert has waded into these communities either to challenge or to
educate. So we are left to figure things out for ourselves and share
information.)
1. Yes, it is possible
I tried YBCR (or Doman) with my child, and it didn’t work for us.
So, not all small children can learn to read.
Let me first clarify this: I would not claim that all babies and
toddlers can learn to read before the age of three, any more than I
would claim that all children can learn to read before the age of
seven. I wish both things were true, but I am a realist. Sometimes,
the right circumstances simply don’t come together.
I make the more modest claim that many people who try it with
their children will succeed. What is the proportion? I wish I knew,
but I don’t have a clue. My best guess is a majority. But then,
maybe it’s a minority, and I simply don’t hear about the many
failures. This is one reason why I think there’s an urgent need for
studies of very early reading programs—precisely to settle
questions such as this. What if it turns out that 80% of undertwos who start a program, and use it according to instructions,
can decode words phonetically by age three? That would be huge
news.
The children who are successfully taught to read early must be
profoundly gifted. Your boy probably has “smart genes.” But
surely, most children can’t learn this way.
Despite some of the hype from people selling products and from
some of the parents, I don’t think kids who learn to read at an
early age are necessarily “geniuses.” Critics generally assert that
those children who are able to read with facility and
comprehension from an early age were “gifted” to begin with,
with the implication that average-intelligence kids cannot be
taught to read at a very early age. I was lucky enough to get an
email from Tufts child developmentalist, Maryanne Wolf, and that
was her opinion of my own son: he is “more than likely one the
outliers on the y axis” of the famous bell-shaped curve of various
human attributes.
I disagree with both the hype and the critics: toddlers who can
read are not necessarily geniuses, any more than are toddlers who
can use sign language. In discussion with other parents online
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who use these programs—and with all due respect to these often
wonderful, generous parents—I’ve seen little indication that the
babies who have been taught to read come from unusually brilliant
genes. Many parents who use Doman and other early learning
programs admit they themselves did not do very well in school,
and occasionally admit to being no geniuses themselves; they just
want to give their children an advantage.
Both Doman and Titzer, who have considerable experience with
the range of kids who are taught to read early, have said that
success in being taught to read early, in their experience, is not a
simple function of intelligence. If they are to be believed, there are
many parents of average intelligence who have taught their babies
and toddlers to decode many words.
And most persuasive, if you can accept the claims, is that Doman
developed his early reading program originally for brain-damaged
children, and he claims that many of such children have been
taught to read independently by their preschool years using his
methods. Such reports would give support to the notion that
genius-level genes aren’t necessary for the success of the “baby
reading” programs.
Aren’t these children merely memorizing a handful of words by
shape?
Now we move into somewhat more difficult objections. Some
critics say that, even if very small children of average or low
intelligence can memorize words, they’re just memorizing the
overall shape of the word—they aren’t sounding out the words or
learning phonics, and so they aren’t really reading. Some leading
methods of teaching babies and toddlers to read, including
Doman’s and Titzer’s, might seem open to this criticism, because
they involve showing tots words in a fairly haphazard way, but
over and over again. (To be precise, though, while Titzer’s videos
feature a lot of repetition, Doman’s method would have the
parent flash a word to a child only a half-dozen times or so over a
period of a few days, and then that word is taken out of rotation.)
1. Yes, it is possible
Such methods, which resemble the old “whole word” or “lookand-say” methods of reading, do not explicitly teach kids to sound
out new words phonetically (i.e., according to the sounds that the
individual letters make), which—I agree—is the sine qua non of
genuine decoding ability. I have three responses to this.
First, a simple point. The font style and color in YBCR and many
Doman-inspired presentations are deliberately varied. Moreover,
many very early readers (including my son) have shown they could
read cursive handwriting without any sort of systematic exposure
to it at all. The point is that the children are apparently not
depending on cues related to font.
Second, Titzer claims to have observed many kids who have
picked up phonetic rules automatically. The Doman camp makes
similar claims too. The idea is, for example, that after a kid learns
“same” and “game” and “tame,” he begins to understand that the
“e” at the end of the word makes the “a” say its name. He doesn’t
have to be taught this rule explicitly; he just picks it up inductively.
Titzer also claims that the plastic early brain—the ability of baby
brains to be easily “wired” and “rewired” in radically different
ways—is ideally suited to learn just such rules. That’s largely the
same way the brain quickly learns to pick out individual words
from the steady stream of consonants and vowels and eventually
to understand the grammatical rules of spoken English.
Confirming evidence for the predicted effect, as far as I know, is
just anecdotal. I’ve seen many claims from parents in online
discussion groups that their children, as young as one year old, are
able to sound out new words. That is, there are tiny tots who have
gone through these programs who are able to sound out words
they’ve never seen before, just as if they had learned explicit
phonics—according to their parents, who are highly interested in
such abilities. By the way, phonics is worked in a little in the Your
Baby Can Read series and some more in the follow-up Your Child
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Can Read series. Another program that incorporates some
elements of phonics is the BrillKids “Little Reader” software.
Third, if you aren’t convinced that your child will pick up the rules
“on the fly,” you don’t have to teach your kid to read in a
“haphazard” way at all. As I explained in Part 1, I presented flash
cards to my boy based on phonetic groupings, and it was plain to
see that he was picking up the rules as we went from set to set.
But, somewhat to my surprise, I also noticed that he was learning
to read many words well before we learned the rules that would
allow him to sound out those words. Probably, Titzer is right that
kids do learn phonetic rules “on the fly” and “in context,” but I
suspect that presenting words to kids according to progressively
arranged phonetic groupings will help them in this learning
process. Obviously, careful empirical study is needed.
However the children do it, by the time they’re two or three,
many of them who started reading earlier can sound out new
words. For example, here’s a two-year-old phonetically sounding
out “slipper” (at 3:41). My own son is another example, and of
course many other examples of very young children using phonics
can be found on YouTube.
The point in any case is that these early learners can sound out
new words, in fact, and it is possible to carry out programs similar
to Doman’s and Titzer’s that use systematic phonics. These two
points partially (but do not completely) defang a point made
frequently by reading specialists, such as Trevor Cairney, who
offer warnings about the YBCR videos, criticizing them because
they appear only to teach babies to memorize whole words.
Cairney says in a blog post that the videos teach children only to
“recognise instantly a number of words,” while full-bodied
reading requires that they “learn the sounds of language and their
correspondence with print” and “understand the structure of
language and how it works.”
1. Yes, it is possible
Such objections can be powerful especially for those who, like me,
are supporters of synthetic, intensive, systematic phonics. But I
think the advisability of teaching early reading does not stand or
fall with the merits of the whole word method. Moreover, I’ve
encountered several parents online who started their babies
reading using the Doman method and later, after a few years,
introduced phonics systematically. Whether this helps to mitigate
any problems that phonics supporters might have with the whole
word learning methods, I have no idea—I’d guess it does. But
certainly, you don’t have to buy into the whole word/whole
language approach in order to support very early reading.
A child who has learned to read very early does not master other
skills that are traditionally taught, in kindergarten and first grade, at
the same time as reading, such as handwriting, spelling, the first
rudiments of grammar and punctuation, etc. Doesn’t that show
claims that “your baby can read” ultimately to be misleading?
The first claim here is perfectly true. I have discovered that even
at age four, my boy could not quickly locate a letter in an
alphabetical list of letters (so he did not know the order or
placement of letters very well); he was around average in his
handwriting skills; while he could spell some words, he didn’t spell
a lot (but some early-educated kids can do this); and he had barely
started to learn the difference between a noun and a verb. So
some kindergarten and first grade skills were still quite challenging
for him. But he could decode at or above the fifth grade level, and
his vocabulary, comprehension, and ability to detect misspelled
words (for example, “nite”) were all quite advanced for his age
(not as advanced as his decoding ability, of course).
This is a problem only if you had the notion that when people say
“your baby can read” they mean “your baby is ready to start
kindergarten language arts”—which is absolutely false, and I don’t
think anyone claims that it is true. To be sure, there are various
things you can do to accelerate a very young child’s understanding
of kindergarten language arts, if you wanted to do that. But I fully
concede that there are some things about language that, no matter
what techniques you use, you just can’t teach to a baby or toddler.
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It’s just that decoding written English—that particular skill, as hard as
it is for so many first graders—is not one of those more advanced
skills. I think our experience, like that of other parents I’ve talked
with, indicates that learning to decode written English is not
terribly difficult for very young children to learn. Most people
simply don’t know this.
It’s just “barking at print”; it’s not really reading. Some tiny children
might be able to decode written language, but they aren’t getting
meaning from it.
Many educationists, if pressed, will acknowledge that it may look
like some babies and toddlers can read, but they will immediately
dismiss what’s going on as “barking at print” or “word calling.”
These contemptuous descriptions mean that kids can say words
out loud, but they don’t really understand what they are appear to
be reading. I have two responses to this.
First, the one- and two-year-olds in those videos are usually
shown words like “hi” and “dog” and “nose,” all of which are
probably words that the kids understand perfectly well when
spoken out loud (by themselves or by others). So if the same
children read the same words, why think they can’t understand
them? Of course they can. This is true of simple sentences, I’m
sure. If a child reads, “The ball is blue,” and you see everyday
evidence of the child understanding such simple sentences, then
why claim that he doesn’t know the meaning of the same sentence
when he reads it out loud? Of course he does. This might evoke
protests that I am misunderstanding, but I don’t think so. The
claim, again, is that the early readers are merely barking at print. But
obviously, they aren’t. So let’s discuss some different, more
modest, more plausible criticisms.
First, let me concede a few things. It’s true that the ability to
“read,” in any useful sense of the word, is limited by one’s ability
to comprehend language. In other words, if a kid looks at a written
sentence and says it out loud, but the sentence has words or
1. Yes, it is possible
grammatical constructions that he just doesn’t understand, he
hasn’t really “read” the sentence in the sense of having understood
it. It’s entirely possible that a kid at two years old might be able to
decode many strings of words that he doesn’t really understand. I
also want to concede that even seemingly simple sentences can
have all sorts of relatively advanced conceptual “baggage” that a
small child does not grasp; I don’t claim, of course, that a reading
two-year-old’s understanding of a sentence is as sophisticated as
an older child’s or an adult’s, just because he can decode the
sentence. So when, at age three, my boy read the First
Amendment, I did not conclude that he could understand the First
Amendment; of course he couldn’t. But so what? He can still read
a lot of things that he can understand well enough, like the Magic
Tree House books he loves so much. That’s the real point, which
must not be passed over lightly.
There’s a related criticism. It goes like this: “Babies can’t read.
They can memorize words and simple sentences, but that isn’t
reading, even if they understand the words. Reading means
understanding words that are strung together to make sentences,
which are then strung together to the length of stories.” I concede
that most if not all babies can’t read in the same sense that we use
when we say a first grader (with similar decoding skills) can read;
that sounds right to me. Perhaps there are no babies (under age
two), that go through programs like I am going to describe, who
can both read and, in any meaningful sense, really understand
enough sentences strung together to make up, say, a typical fairy
tale. This is not so difficult for the first grader.
(Robert Titzer believes I am conceding too much here. He told
me that he has observed 18-month-olds who could read and
understand very simple books, such as “level one” readers.
Obviously, this is a matter for further study and debate; as a
philosopher, I have to wonder what it even means to say that an
18-month-old “understands” a text.)
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Such criticisms are sometimes advanced as if they settled the
matter, but they do not. Many slightly older children, two- and
three-year-olds, who are properly trained can both read and
understand simple stories in the same way they understand the
same stories when read to them. If you aren’t convinced, go back
to YouTube and look at some of these videos, or these. Then ask
yourself: could those tots understand those stories if they were
read to them? No, not perfectly, but well enough—and so, if they
are reading the stories themselves, they are grasping the language
just as well as they would if mommy or daddy were reading to
them. I suppose research might prove me wrong on this point,
but I don’t see why reading for oneself would make
comprehension much more difficult than being read to.
There is another way to explain this objection, however, that
makes it more plausible. “Word calling” or “barking at print”
means reading without comprehension. This is often associated
with the tendency of some beginning readers to read slowly,
effortfully, in a monotone, syllable by syllable—which naturally
raises the question whether the meaning of the words they are so
painstakingly reading is really sinking in. Children who read with
more fluidity and with proper emphasis seem to understand the
text more easily. (Of course, even they are not necessarily doing
so; my boy read about two- and four-cycle engines pretty fluidly,
but I am sure he didn’t understand the text very well.) There are
some videos on YouTube, such as this one, in which very early
readers are reading haltingly, and might seem to be “word
calling.” Now, even if they do, I’ve seen proud parents frequently
write about them by the age of four or five, reporting that they are
then reading quite quickly, fluidly, and at advanced level.
The relevant question is whether children who start early are more
likely than other beginning readers to do word calling of this sort.
Obviously, empirical studies are needed to assess this. Based only
on the dozens of videos of young readers I’ve watched, it doesn’t
seem to me that younger children are more likely to read very
haltingly; the youngest book readers you can see on YouTube,
2. The problem of the sales hype
even around age 24 months, seem to be reading with some
fluidity. This obviously doesn’t establish that they understand
what they mean, but it does indicate that they are not reading
“slowly, effortfully, in a monotone, syllable by syllable.” It also
admittedly doesn’t prove much, because most parents will upload
only those videos in which their children shine.
Now, there is a closely-related issue, that finally gets down to
something really interesting. Sure, many small children can learn
to read, and yes, many can understand simple books that they read
themselves with some facility, but still, perhaps there is no point to
learning to read at an early age, precisely because few children are
conceptually ready, early on, to benefit as much as they can later.
This is a much more reasonable and subtle point; we’ll come back
to it later, especially but not only in Section 9. But to put the
present issue to rest, the notion that children don’t benefit from
early reading does not mean that they are merely “barking at
print” (in any sense) when they are reading books that they can
understand.
This will have to do for my initial defense of the claim that it is
possible to teach very young children how to read. Next, I will
reply to a variety of other objections and questions.
2. The problem of the sales hype
The extravagant claims of those selling early reading products are
wrong or overblown. Maybe there’s something to them, but isn’t
the sales hype over the top?
I have to agree that, as with many consumer products that are
supposed to do unusual things, there is a lot of breathless hype in
this field. Speaking as an avid consumer of baby learning
products, the claims strike me as sometimes cringe-inducing and
over-the-top.
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Glenn Doman in his books and videos is given to making all sorts
of quite extravagant claims, such as that all children are born with
more innate intellectual ability than geniuses like da Vinci and
Einstein ever used, and that they would rather learn than eat.
At the time I drafted this section, YourBabyCanRead.com was
offering up a “Reading Grade Level Progression” chart that made
it look as if credible data had been published that shows that use
of YBCR causes children to read as well as 12-year-olds by the
time they are six. Intellbaby.com makes scientific-sounding but
vague claims such as “Research shows that a one year old will
learn twice as fast as a three year old,” and lays on the pressure:
“Don’t be left behind.” But hats off to BrillKids.com, which
acknowledges and responds at great length to a well-informed,
skeptical stance toward what they are trying to sell. Their more
balanced long essay, “The Arguments For + Against Early
Learning,” strikes a more sensible tone.
I have actually become acquainted with some of the people
behind such products, and they (small business owners) all strike
me as being well-meaning, sincere, and intelligent. Perhaps they
shouldn’t be blamed too much if they do not present their
information in the measured, cautious tones of science. After all,
they are saying that babies can be taught to read and deeply benefit
thereby—which is revolutionary, if true. Besides, just consider
Glenn Doman again: his Institutes for the Achievement of
Human Potential is a non-profit. If he were merely a crass profitseeker, surely he would have devoted his long life (he is now in his
90s), instead, to a for-profit concern. Yet Doman is probably the
biggest hypester there is about this stuff. Though he frequently
overuses hyperbole, his enthusiasm seems sincere, even charming;
after all, to look at how many Doman-trained kids do, there
would seem to be a lot to be enthusiastic about.
I can only ask the reader to look past the hype, if it is so hard to
stomach, at least long enough to investigate the methods a little
more closely. I can’t fault anyone for distrusting people who try to
sell products using vague, unproven, or overblown claims. I
3. Why isn’t this already common knowledge and practice?
totally understand anyone who says, “If it sounds too good to be
true, it probably is.” I would simply have you pay attention to the
results, consumers, and methods of these products, rather than the
sales patter. When you see videos of the children themselves
reading at a much earlier age than you yourself learned, it is hard
as a parent not to ask yourself, “Wouldn’t I like that for my
children? I wonder if we could do that.” Anyway, that is the
thought I had, about two years ago, when I first learned about
these methods. I’m glad that I did set aside my own
disappointment with the hype.
3. Why isn’t this already common knowledge and
practice?
If there were anything to this, surely I would know about it
already—it would be common knowledge, and everybody would be
doing it. Why isn’t that the case?
How on Earth can there be several successful methods of
teaching very young children to read and so many people haven’t
heard of them before? Why isn’t all of this common knowledge?
First of all, especially after the YBCR infomercials, that babies can
read is becoming increasingly common knowledge, especially
among parents. But it’s very far from being widely accepted, let
alone mainstream.
Why it has taken this long to hit the general public consciousness,
I don’t know. But I have a hypothesis that I will share with you. I
think that most of the American people, at least (and maybe the
West generally), share two basic world views with most
academics: romanticism and egalitarianism. According to the
romantic view of childhood learning, introduced by Rousseau's
Emile and popularized by Montessori among others, children learn
best naturally, by exploring the world and applying their own
budding skills to the discovery of knowledge; it is somewhat
opposed to all sorts of direct teaching, and more strongly opposed
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to straightforward imparting or memorizing of facts in the early
years, as in lectures and reading books. And, according to
egalitarianism, everybody should be equal. It used to be that this
meant only equal under the law; then it was expanded to mean
equal in opportunity to achieve happiness; then it was expanded
to mean equal in outcomes, or basically in any attribute that
society values. How progressive you are is largely determined by
how much (or what kinds of) equality you think should be
mandated. The founder of the dominant philosophy of education
in American education schools, educational progressivism, was
John Dewey. He was strongly in favor of institutionalized
schooling and social development in order to make good citizens,
and he underemphasized the getting of facts.
I suspect that these two root ideas explain why most Americans,
and American academics, are largely opposed to any sort of
systematic direction of early learning. Let me explain.
If you’re a romantic, you favor Nature. The Natural way to learn
to read, it seems, is not to break down words into their phonetic
parts, or do “drills,” but instead—and only when children are
“ready”—to just Naturally start reading words that they’re familiar
with. When children do so on their own, they are probably
sounding out the words, but they do so because they are in some
sense ready to do so (without any direct, systematic teaching). I
will discuss this some more, further down.
Moreover, if you’re a thoroughgoing egalitarian, you don’t want
any kids, or worse, any kids’ parents, to get too uppity. I believe
this is why there have often been quite harsh reactions to YBCR
and, earlier, Doman. A totally committed egalitarian becomes
suspicious and possibly hostile if some parents want their children
to distinguish themselves too much. So there is a natural suspicion
about parents who do extra educational activities with their kids:
they must be pushing too hard. They must be “too ambitious.”
They probably only want to get their kids into Harvard, the elitist
snobs (or, if the shoe fits: the bourgeois social climbers). Their
3. Why isn’t this already common knowledge and practice?
shallow, bourgeois ambition will rob their children of their
natural, pure childhood. It does not matter, apparently, what the
parents themselves report about their own motivations.
Nor does it seem to matter that many of the objectionable
educational activities (unlike unobjectionable ones, like bookreading) take up only minutes out of every day. Never mind that
the children love the activities and beg for them. Never mind that
kids are like little sponges who desperately want to learn, that they
get some of their greatest pleasure out of learning.
I maintain to the contrary that, like it or not, there will always be
radical differences between people, because there are radical
differences not only in natural abilities and home environment,
but also in levels of motivation. Therefore, there need be no guilt
if your child is learning more (or less), or if you are motivated to
seek out creative ways to help your child learn more. And you
might of course foster many new interests and thereby create even
more learning—which, like it or not, might create more
inequalities.
Many of the opinion-making academics and reporters who
encounter the whole phenomenon of teaching babies to read are
naturally inclined against it, I suggest, partly because they believe
that mostly white, ambitious, bourgeois types will be attracted to
it, and those people are already at an educational advantage in
society. An example can be found in David Elkind’s Miseducation:
Preschoolers at Risk, in which Elkind devotes an entire chapter (the
second) to laying out eight different stereotypes of parenting
styles, and how these varieties of snobbish and over-ambitious
parents are attracted to accelerated early learning. He even gives
them names such as “Gourmet Parents” and “College-Degree
Parents.”
In such a hostile rhetorical climate, to write about or promote
very early reading might seem inegalitarian and un-progressive.
Early reading programs appeal only to parents “grasping” for their
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children to “get ahead,” when they are already bound to go farther
than most. That’s my best guess about why you haven’t heard
much about them apart from the YBCR infomercials, YouTube,
and word-of-mouth—and the occasional (often highly critical)
mention in the mass media.
If I am right, maybe I can help remove some of the resistance to
these programs by pointing out a few things. First, this video and
follow ups made an impression on me. Similarly, whenever I
search for “Your Baby Can Read” on Twitter, I see that a large
portion of the people commenting on the topic is black. This
brought home for me that this is not a white-only thing. Well,
why would it be? Nor is it merely an American bourgeois thing.
In fact, in the forums about very early reading that I frequent, I
estimate that around half of the participants are located outside
of, or have emigrated from outside of, the United States. These
programs are especially popular among Asians and eastern
Europeans; YBCR has had a big reception in Asia, and the
BrillKids folks are located in Hong Kong. Some other competing
methods, not mentioned here (only because I’m not very familiar
with them), originate in the Far East.
Also, for what it’s worth, the funder of the project I’m working
on currently, WatchKnow.org, is also seeking to fund a study
which places YBCR in preschools and daycares that serve poor,
inner-city Memphis areas. I agree with him that these efforts have
the same potential that the Head Start program had: if it turns out
that very young children can learn to read at a very early age by
using these programs, it becomes important that we try to use
them with disadvantaged children precisely to give them a leg up.
An online acquaintance added a related point that perhaps I
should have placed first: surely the main reason many parents
aren’t motivated to try programs like this is that they believe it is
the role of schools to teach reading. So they might even be
convinced that the program works perfectly well—they simply
would rather leave the whole job of teaching their children to read
4. The marginalization of very early reading
with “the professionals.” Of course, many educators themselves
are no doubt inclined the same way; if a child arrives at
kindergarten knowing how to read, that is something of a problem
for the teacher.
4. The marginalization of very early reading
It’s a kooky fringe practice. If most experts don’t take it seriously,
why should I?
After studying and discussing these very early reading programs,
my impression is that its professional critics, including most
educationists,
reading
specialists,
and
developmental
psychologists, have two main responses: claims to being able to
teach small children to read are far overblown, and even if it’s
possible to some extent, it’s not beneficial and possibly harmful.
The extent of the contempt that some experts have for a program
like YBCR can be seen, for example, in an October 2010 segment
from the Today Show. (This program was biased and shockingly
unfair to Robert Titzer and YBCR, in my opinion.)
Some experts resist admitting that teaching very young children to
read is even possible. We’ve gone over this in Section 1, but it’s
worth approaching the question from a slightly different angle.
A perfect example would be a developmental psychologist
answering a question for BabyCenter.com: “Q. When and how
can I teach my toddler to read?” The expert’s answer:
The truth is, right now you really can’t. Children usually
don’t start reading before the age of 5 or 6, and for good
reason. Researchers believe that until that age, most
children have not yet formed certain neural connections
that allow them to decode printed letters and then mentally
combine them to make words. A few children are able to
read earlier, but most of them just pick it up; they don’t
learn through direct instruction.
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Apparently, some “neural connections” are needed to “decode
printed letters and then mentally combine them to make words”
(surely that much is true!), and most children just don’t have those
connections (except for the two-year-olds who have been taught
to read?). The suggestion here is that there is something
mysterious, probably comprehensible only to experts, about brain
physiology that makes it impossible to teach younger children to
read. That’ll put a damper on any parent’s excitement—you can’t
change your child’s grey matter, it’s not mature yet. Only “a few
children” have adequately mature grey matter. The expert says so,
so you don’t need to think about that anymore.
Similarly, in reviews of these programs, critics often take the time
to make a puzzlingly obvious observation, which is sometimes
stated as if it were an argument-stopper: this has children learning
to read years before children normally do. Period. So anyone who
uses these programs with their babies or toddlers is doing
something quite abnormal. The term they use is “developmentally
inappropriate,” a term we will be returning to later in detail.
Attempting to do something developmentally inappropriate
usually results in frustration on the part of both teacher and
student, because the student just isn’t ready yet.
Yet, as we’ve seen, reading is possible for a wide variety of small
children who use various early reading programs, whose facility
and eagerness with written language belies any suggestion that
they aren’t ready. So what gives?
I want to discuss the attitude or stance exhibited here. According
to an expert offering advice to parents and teachers, it is not
worth discussing at all—it is “not even wrong,” not even a serious
option or possibility—that children can be taught to read as
babies or toddlers. This sort of “silent treatment” is rhetorically,
for many people, one of the strongest arguments against early
reading that experts present. If a person offered up as an expert
isn’t seriously discussing very early reading at all, then there must
be something wrong with it. This sort of professional contempt
4. The marginalization of very early reading
especially impacts academics, who fear the disfavor of their
colleagues.
There are two things to say about the “silent treatment.” First,
in discussions with them, and interviews I’ve read and observed,
some experts evince very little acquaintance with the phenomenon
they’re commenting on. They know a lot about how children
normally read, how they acquire language, how brains get wired
up for language learning, ordinary precocious readers (in the sense
of those who begin at age three or four), and other admittedly
relevant subject matters. But I have not yet been able to find, not
without trying, a critical expert making an argument of the
following form: “I have encountered many reading toddlers in my
career, and based on this experience, I infer…” In other words, as
far as I can tell, the experts are simply guessing, based on (a) their
more general theoretical knowledge about brain science, child
development, and the psychology of reading, (b) their specific
knowledge of ordinary precocious readers, and (c) the whole
“pushy parent/superbaby” cultural phenomenon of which they
often have such contempt. Critics rarely refer to their personal
experience of the very earliest readers themselves, because as far
as I can tell, few or none of them have such personal experience.
This is understandable if for no other reason than that the
phenomenon has been so rare.
This could now be changing. For what it’s worth, I have heard
that there are four scientific studies of YBCR under way, and as
I said, the people behind WatchKnow are helping to arrange
another one.
As to those experts I’ve come across online and in books that are
at least somewhat familiar with the phenomenon of extremely
early reading, they have a whole variety of things to say about it.
There is quite a bit of research about “precocious readers,” but
the literature mostly concerns children who “naturally” pick up
language before entering kindergarten. Most of such children
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begin reading at the age of 3, 4, or 5. I was able to find one article
which discussed a case of reading below the age of three
(Henderson et al., 1993). The article discusses a child who read
“pizza” at 24 months and was reading new words phonetically at
two years, seven months. But the child was, or was treated as,
mainly self-taught: “Precocious readers learn to read at unusually
early ages, without formal instruction and with varying degrees of
adult assistance.” (p. 78) (I have more about research on
precocious readers in Section 12 below.)
The topic of extremely early reading is also discussed in
connection with hyperlexia and related disorders. For example, a
2005 book by Audra Jensen with the promising-sounding title,
When Babies Read, bears the subtitle, A Practical Guide to Helping
Young Children with Hyperlexia, Asperger Syndrome and High-Functioning
Autism. Of course, those are not the children we’re talking about.
Interestingly, this book discusses the question whether to teach
very young autistic children to read, and actually gives pointers on
doing so, drawing on the methods of both Doman and Titzer.
But there have been very few experts who seem to be interested
in coming to grips with the phenomenon—without simply
dismissing or criticizing it—of an otherwise normal 2-year-old
who is deliberately taught to read as a baby, and who seems to be
able to understand books meant for her age, such as Dr. Seuss
“Beginner Books” or Little Bear. This is very puzzling to me,
because it is obviously such a fascinating subject for study.
If a researcher does a serious, credible study and discovers that
these children are not (for some reason) really reading, that only a
tiny portion of the children who start an early reading program
learn to read, that they are not advanced readers by Kindergarten
age, or something else damning, then an industry is satisfyingly
debunked, and the world is safe for conventional notions of
“reading readiness.” On the other hand, if the research
demonstrates that it really is possible to teach ordinary children
(and even children with brain defects, according to Doman) to
4. The marginalization of very early reading
read as toddlers, then we might open up a whole new world of
educational possibilities to future generations of children.
Given the availability of such attractive and low-hanging research
fruit, what accounts for the reluctance of researchers to discuss
the phenomenon in any way other than dismissively? I believe it is
ultimately because the social sciences—and this definitely includes
fields such as early childhood education and developmental
psychology—is heavily value-laden. Scientific-sounding jargon
such as “developmentally appropriate” frequently reflects a whole
set of deep assumptions that are not so much proven by hard data
as a matter of common cultural practices, and accepted as part of
a broad philosophical view of human nature. (I do not mean to
deny that there is such a thing as a developmentally inappropriate
time to teach something; I’m commenting only about how this
concept is used.) And suffice it to say that for reasons mentioned
above and others, the world view of most researchers in most
relevant fields strongly militates against any early “academic”-type
learning. One exception is what I consider to be academic training
par excellence, namely, parents reading books to children, for which,
curiously, an exception often seems to be made. (Rousseau
himself wasn’t big on books for small children. He didn’t
encourage his Emile to learn to read until he was an adolescent.)
The point is that many experts who ought to be studying this
phenomenon come from a world view that encourages them to
pretend that the phenomenon does not exist, or to dismiss it
without serious consideration. This is why, I’d like to suggest, the
fact that so many reading and learning experts are dismissive of
very early reading does not mean “there must be something wrong
with it.”
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5. The pressure objection
Early education is pushy. Teaching skills too early runs the risk of
burning out reluctant learners or depressing them. It’s admirable
that you want your children to learn, but won’t forcing them to
learn backfire?
Opponents often claim that early reading turns kids off, because
the parents push the kids too hard. That has not been my
experience in discussing these things with parents online, but
before I respond, let me elaborate the objection. There is a
tendency for critics, both researchers and non-experts, to assume
that parents who engage in early education are uniformly “pushy”
and “competitive”—strict disciplinarians, harsh taskmasters. With
such parents standing over children and bossing them around in
their formative reading experiences, reading would inevitably
make them bored, disgusted, frustrated, depressed, and resistant.
Patrice Holden Werner and JoAnna Strother (1987) explained
such concerns in depth:
Pressure to read and perform at a very early age can
sometimes lead children to be cautious and afraid to make
mistakes. These children may perceive parents and teachers
as setting standards that are beyond their ability to
achieve… Unfortunately, they may develop negative
attitudes toward learning and the school atmosphere. Also,
some children living in an atmosphere of high standards
perceive that their self worth is directly related to their early
performance, usually in reading.
Werner and Strother make a convincing case that parents should
not expect their children to read at an early age. They give a case
study of a 4-year-old reading at a grade level of 1.5, whose parents
certainly seem to have pressured him inappropriately and had
inappropriately high expectations. The little boy experienced some
social problems at preschool, “frustration, anxiety, and a strong
5. The pressure objection
need for autonomy,” as well as alarming levels of aggression. I
have no doubt that such cases exist. But, to their credit, Werner
and Strother go on to describe a different early reader who was
positively “encouraged” to read, not pressured.
The question that critics never address is this: why think that, in
general, parents who try to teach reading to children using YBCR
and similar tools use pressure tactics to do so?
Suppose the answer is, “But heavy-handed tactics are the only way
you can make an ordinary child read at an early age.” This sounds
plausible to the uninitiated, but the problem is that it’s simply
false. It belies any close acquaintance with the methods under
discussion. In fact, if it is your position that very young children
can be led to read only by stern, disciplinarian methods, against the
wishes of the children, you simply don’t know what you’re talking
about. No offense, really, but you’re just guessing or uninformed.
As many parents who have actually taught their tiny children to
read, it is very much like a game for the children. We are not
exaggerating when we say they love it.
It is possible to let the child go exactly at his own pace, merely
presenting him materials in various innovative ways, such as I
described in Part 1. Parents can be very sensitive to how much
their children likes learning, so that they never push them when
they doesn’t want to go, and they make sure they’re excited about
it. What if you take breaks of weeks or even months from a
subject or skill, and then he comes back all excited to learn more?
I’ve done that, and so have other parents I’ve talked to. Then
you’re not pushing your child; he’s leading the way.
To assume that early teaching of reading means that the parent
must be pushing too hard—that there is no way to teach reading to
toddlers without pushing—is to assume that children at an early age
have either a natural resistance, or else an inability, to learn the
decoding of language. But why think that? All the indicators I
have seen are that the opposite is true: my own boy, like many
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others, absolutely loved YBCR. He eventually grew tired of it, but
only after seeing it many, many times by his own urgent pleas.
Similarly, he used to ask for new flash cards (the ones I made) all
the time and he never failed to be excited about new ones. He did
get tired of them sometimes after a few presentations. Because I
was concerned about him getting bored and turned off, I taught
him to say “that’s enough.” When he said that, we took a break,
sometimes an extended break.
I ought to consider a rebuttal here. In the Preface of Miseducation,
Elkind writes:
Infants and young children accept and participate in
miseducation because it pleases those to whom they are
attached, namely, their parents, not because they find it
interesting or enjoyable. Miseducation can thus invoke
internal conflicts and can set the groundwork for the more
classical psychological problems such as neurosis and
neurotic character formation. (p. xiv)
This suggests a reply to me. The fact that children are willing to be
taught to read, Elkind might say, does not mean that they find it
interesting or enjoyable. They go along because they want to
please their parents. That is still a kind of pressure—more subtle,
but still pressure, with potentially serious consequences.
There are several things to say about this, but I will not take much
time with it. One problem is that it “proves too much” and is for
that reason not worth very much as an argument: one can say of
virtually anything that a parent proposes, and which a child agrees
to, that the child does it because it pleases his parents, not because
he finds it interesting. If this point were true of all parent-led
activities, then we would all be neurotics, because you cannot get
through childhood without a huge number of parent-led activities.
And if it is supposed to be true only or especially in this case—if
children do not really find YBCR or phonics flashcards, for
example, interesting or enjoyable—then why think so?
6. The vicarious achievement worry
As a general point, perhaps it is true that sometimes children go
along with what their parents want, despite not really wanting to,
because they want to please their parents. But any sensitive parent
knows when a child is “going along to get along” and when he is
genuinely enthusiastic. I am fairly sure that my little boy, at least,
was often genuinely enthusiastic about my phonics flashcards, and
he desperately wanted to watch YBCR for the couple months that
we were watching it. He cried if we turned it off or refused his
demands to watch it. What better sign of genuine enthusiasm
could you ask for?
6. The vicarious achievement worry
If I taught my tot to read, wouldn’t this basically prove that I’m an
overambitious parent, using my child as a proxy for my own
ambitions? Wouldn’t I just be feeding my own ego?
I think many parents resist very early reading because of a certain
stigma attached to “early academics” as well as “hot-housing” in
general. Parents—especially mothers, or so one can read in a USA
Today article—can be very judgmental. Many have definite
opinions on all sorts of child-raising questions, and are not afraid
to express them. Since very early reading methods are newly in the
public eye due to YBCR, and since they are controversial, it is easy
for critical parents to try to crush the egos of those who are using
these methods. The parent who is doing the unusual thing can be
made to feel vain and overambitious, and reckless with the
development of their children. No one wants to think of himself,
or herself, that way.
Doing much “extra” for one’s children, in terms of classes and
educational tools, invites such accusations. Some expert opinion
supports this attitude as well; there are some quite insulting
assumptions about early-educating parents in books like
Miseducation: Preschoolers at Risk and Einstein Never Used Flashcards
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(not to say that these books do not also have a lot of very useful
information and sound argumentation, which they do).
The authors of these books tend to lump the early teaching of
reading in with the whole movement of “hot-housing” children,
of getting them on the fast track, into the best preschools, doing
everything they can to get them into “gifted” programs, taking
music and language lessons, and filling their schedules with
activities. The child is often in the car, being shuttled around,
probably miserable and under pressure, and has little time for free
play. (Cf. especially Elkind’s Miseducation, Ch. 2.)
But let’s take a step back and try to evaluate the matter a little
more objectively.
The description “hot-housing” seems very puzzling when applied
to our family, at least. My own boy has never been enrolled in a
single class of any kind, though we have gone to group events
such as library reading sessions for kids, and recently, a nonacademic two-day preschool for socialization. We have no designs
whatsoever on getting him into any prestigious schools and if he’s
behind the curve in some abilities (which he might be), I’m only a
little bothered by that. Similarly, I don’t see much evidence that
the parents in the online support communities I’m part of engage
in a lot of this sort of “hot-housing.” Maybe a few do—at least
one was asking about entrance exams for academic preschools—
but most of them seem to me to be stay-at-home moms who
essentially do home schooling before kindergarten. In fact, on a
few occasions we have collectively taken offense at dismissive
labels such as “hot-housing.” We resent the suggestion that we are
so demanding and competitive as parents that we are insensitive
to our children’s wants and needs.
Absent a really good survey or study of parents who engage in
early reading programs, one cannot draw such harsh conclusions
with much justification.
7. The too-much-video, too-early objection
I suspect that the harsh prejudices about early-learning parents are
due more to defensiveness on the part of the critics than any
careful observation of parents. This shouldn’t be surprising in the
least. The critics believe themselves to be loving, caring, and
intelligent, and so the last thing many of them want to hear is that
they’ve missed out on the possibility of benefitting their children
by teaching them to read in the first few years of life. For many
critics, I suspect, to hear early reading programs praised, or even
taken seriously, is to hear two insults of themselves: first, as a
parent (and this no doubt goes for teachers and researchers too),
you have not done all you could to support the children in your
care; and second, you have merely conformed to tradition, when
you think of yourself as independent-minded and open to good
new ideas. In the face of such insults—which I do not believe and
would never dream of making—the easy response is to attack the
intelligence, morality, or sanity of those who sell and use such
programs.
7. The too-much-video, too-early objection
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends against
any television before 24 months. Insofar as you support YBCR,
aren’t you recommending something that could cause attention
problems later?
How to respond to this depends on the grounds for the
prohibition. The report from 1999 in which the AAP issued its
recommendation stated:
Pediatricians should urge parents to avoid television
viewing for children under the age of 2 years. Although
certain television programs may be promoted to this age
group, research on early brain development shows that
babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct
interactions with parents and other significant care givers
(e.g., child care providers) for healthy brain growth and the
development of appropriate social, emotional, and
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cognitive skills. Therefore, exposing such young children to
television programs should be discouraged.
The researchers’ worry is that children who are exposed to
television early will thereby be deprived, during prime “active”
time, of loving human interaction, so essential to flourishing.
Screen time separates the child from their best possible teachers:
their parents and caretakers. Now, if that were all there were
behind the prohibition, it seems that looking together at Your Baby
Can Read for 20 minutes per day, or talking through a few
PowerPoint presentations that are basically digitized flashcards,
would surely not do much harm. When my son was a baby,
whenever we looked at a video (which was very infrequent),
he was sitting right next to either my wife or me (or both of us),
and we talked to him about what we were seeing. He seemed to
get quite a bit out of this interaction. Many educational videos for
babies encourage parents to sit with the children, repeat the
words, and essentially “participate” in what becomes more of a
social interaction than a strictly passive experience. Personally,
I am very uncomfortable with letting the television, even with
an educational video playing, act as “babysitter.”
Reduced amount of face time is not, however, the only concern
that the AAP has. A 2004 study available on the AAP website
found an association between 1-3 hours of daily television viewing
at the ages of one and three and an elevated incidence of ADHD
at age seven. One explanation suggested (not asserted) by the
researchers is this: “In contrast to the pace with which real life
unfolds and is experienced by young children, television can
portray rapidly changing images, scenery, and events. It can be
overstimulating yet extremely interesting. This has led some to
theorize that television may shorten children’s attention spans.”
(p. 708) The researchers, in their discussion, make several
concessions, including the usual (but important) one that
association does not establish causation. But the most important
concession is this: “Finally, we had no data on the content of the
television being viewed. Some research indicates that educational
7. The too-much-video, too-early objection
television (e.g., Sesame Street) may in fact promote attention and
reading among school-aged children.” (p. 712) In other words,
this study, which was much celebrated for debunking, specifically,
educational videos for babies, in fact did not even control for
educational content. As JunkScience.com pointed out, the study’s
sample size was also very small.
In 2007, some of the same researchers published another study,
this time specifically including the categories “baby videos” and
“children’s educational shows.” This study claimed that there was
actually an inverse correlation between the viewing of such videos
and language scores (according to the Communicative
Development Inventory). In other words, the more children
watch such videos, the lower their language development. In a
press release, the study’s lead author stated, “There is no clear
evidence of a benefit coming from baby DVDs and videos and
there is some suggestion of harm,” and singled out the Baby
Einstein and Brainy Baby series. In response, the Walt Disney
Company pointed out that the study itself did not support certain
dramatic claims in the press release. For example, the study’s
telephone interviews with parents did not establish that many, or
even any, parents had actually used the Baby Einstein videos. The
company was surely right to point out that the content of the
videos mattered; a vague category that lumps all “baby videos”
together cannot be used to establish anything about every baby
video in such a broad category. The category as a whole might be
slightly pernicious, while certain parts of the category are very
beneficial.
After all, surely it is the case that those who expose the tiniest tots
to television are more likely to be heavy television users, and not
such big readers. But there is an exception, perhaps, in those
parents who use the television only for the highest-quality
educational material.
I also want to point out that it was perfectly reasonable for Disney
to claim that Baby Einstein should be distinguished from the rest of
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the very broad “baby videos” field. If that’s the case, surely Your
Baby Can Read and similar videos have a stronger standing to offer
a similar reply, because unlike Baby Einstein and the other baby
videos out there, these videos appear to be able to teach tots how
to read, perhaps with enough supplementary activities like bookreading. That’s a very significant difference, and can be observed
after a period of months, not years. This then raises the question
—even supposing the researchers have found a correlation
between some baby videos and lower language scores—of whether
any such connection can be found between other sorts of videos
(like YBCR) and language scores.
It is worth pointing out that one recently-published longitudinal
study (Schmidt, et al., 2009), with 872 subjects, found no
correlation at all between watching television (of all kinds) in
infancy and language and visual motor skills at age three.
This section has been rather long and complex, so let me put one
essential point more simply. A worry is that watching videos
before age two will reduce a child’s attentional and language
abilities. But some of these videos (and, perhaps, other screenbased activities) can cause children to learn how to read years
before their peers. Do those videos (and presentations) reduce a
child’s language abilities, or improve them? There is as of this
writing no serious, published research supporting any answer to
that question, as far as I know.
I’d also like to point out, perhaps apropos of nothing, that we do
not get television reception where we live, nor do we subscribe to
cable or satellite TV. We let our boy see videos, on all media, less
than an hour per day on average. One can be a proponent of
educational video, even for babies, and broadly opposed to
television and its many mind-numbing effects.
8. The creative free play objection
8. The creative free play objection
Early teaching of reading (and other information such as is
imparted by Doman flash cards) is unnatural and takes time away
from play. Since gaining experience through free, imaginative play is
the best way for under-fives to learn, what’s the need for this
unnatural force-feeding of mere information?
There is another quite reasonable-sounding objection, one of the
stronger ones, which I want to spend significant space addressing.
Most early childhood researchers take the position that
“academic” learning before school age is inappropriate. Maybe the
most common view among academics of early childhood learning
is that young children learn best from imaginative and social play,
and by finding things out for themselves, “naturally.” Researchers
who take this view heap scorn upon early learning programs like
Doman’s and Titzer’s if for no other reason than that it distracts
from the real “work” of childhood, which is play. In terms of
preparation for school, they recommend simply a “language-rich”
home and preschool, with plenty of conversation, playful
interaction, and book-reading. But trying to teach very young
children to read, exposing them to flashcards, or engaging in other
such formal or “academic” learning, they maintain, is a wasteful
and potentially harmful distraction. (I put “academic” in quotation
marks because I doubt that those who dismiss all learning they
call academic are capable of defining the word in a way that does
not exclude reading and other innocuous or beneficial activities.)
Examples of researchers taking this view are Kathy Hirsh-Pasek
and Roberta Golinkoff, academics and co-author/editors of such
books as A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool and Play =
Learning.
There are a couple of things to say about the “free play”
approach, but one is most important. It is that children who are
exposed to very early reading programs can have plenty of time left
over to play, and to find things out for themselves, because these
programs need not occupy much time at all. The Doman method
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has parents show flashcards to their under-five children for only a
few minutes at a time, a few times per day—the whole time outlay
might be something like 15 minutes. Similarly, Titzer recommends
that the Your Baby Can Read videos be shown twice per day; the
videos are about 20 minutes each. (We watched them just once
per day for a while, and soon were watching them less often.)
Another critic, Trevor Cairney, articulates the point this way:
“in introducing a program like Your Baby Can Read! you are
essentially devoting time to structured repetitive learning of a
limited type that would probably replace other forms of learning.
I asked parents to consider what they would stop doing while
using the program.” In other words, even a few minutes spent on
these programs is time taken away from superior methods of
learning for the under-five set, such as creative play.
But this response seems easy enough to rebut. Let’s suppose that
15 or 40 minutes per day is taken away from creative play. But
also suppose that, by spending time in this way, the children learn
to read years before they would otherwise. Surely, if the programs
have that effect, then taking those minutes away from creative
play might be worth it. It is at the very least plausible to suppose
that those precious few minutes will not provide children the
advantages that learning to read so much earlier would provide.
Critics might also reply that the parents will not stop with just one
video, that they too often park their children in front of the
television-babysitter for hours, and that really zealous parents try
to foist “academic” learning onto their children for much longer
than 15 minutes or 40 minutes per day. That, then, really does cut
into play time. Moreover, the notion that play is a waste of time,
even for children, is hardly unheard-of.
Perhaps. But then the complaint is best made about how some
parents use the programs, not about the programs as intended to be
used. Tarring all of these programs of early education with the bad
habits of some parents is not, or should not be, persuasive.
8. The creative free play objection
Ideological opponents in every discipline frequently try to get the
best of the other side by picking the worst cases and exaggerating
flaws, but such rhetoric should not be persuasive.
I find it telling that, when I have occasionally approached reading
experts, privately, to evaluate what I’ve done with my son, they
have forbore to make such arguments. They have said, rather, that
we’re different, that I could be trusted to pursue the programs in a
reasonable way, and that my son seems to be gifted. The
implication is that others would go overboard and would (perhaps
despite themselves) end up pressuring their average-intelligence
children, not leaving them any time for unstructured free play. My
reply is that, in that case, their objections are not to the methods
themselves but to other more obviously harmful practices of
people who wrongly apply the methods. Such objections do not
seem relevant to scientifically evaluating the methods. Surely, what
we want to know about is whether, when the methods are correctly
used—and that includes leaving children plenty of time for free
play and creative exploration—whether on balance children will
be better or worse off.
To this, I can imagine a reply: “This is how things are in the social
sciences, education, and medicine—we must evaluate real-life
situations and probabilities, not theoretical methods that no one
ever correctly executes. In other words, there is no point in
evaluating Titzer’s and Doman’s methods independently of their
broader social context. Besides, it is certainly true,” I imagine the
critics going on, “that the sorts of parents who undertake these
programs do not stop with just these programs. They are part of a
whole culture of wrongheaded acceleration and harmfully
pressuring children into early achievement.” (Cf. Elkind’s
Miseducation, especially Ch. 4.)
Tarring all parents who follow such programs with the brush of
“hot-housing” is a serious mistake, as I said earlier. But let me
point out now that this is actually a deflection of the argument.
The fact of the matter is that teaching a child to read can be done
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without taking much time away from free play, which is true of
how we have taught our son, and to say this is to defang the
present criticism entirely.
Let me re-present this objection in a different way now. One
prominent strand of educational philosophy holds that children
learn best when they discover things for themselves. Again, this is
at the core of Rousseau’s educational naturalism, and it later took
the form of such educational movements as the project method
and constructivism. An essay like this one is not the place to try to
evaluate such theories and methods. I just want to make one
concession and then one observation.
My concession is that, as with most vague philosophical positions,
there is surely considerable truth “to” educational naturalism (and
constructivism). Everything else being equal, when a student
discovers an answer for herself, and when she is personally
motivated to find it out, she knows it better. Who could disagree?
But the problem is that such platitudes, while inspiring perhaps,
are too vague to prove anything.
My observation is that, vague philosophical theories aside, many
children who use the methods under discussion can actually read
at an amazingly early age. That is not theory but observation.
Most of these children would not be able to read unless they were
exposed to the methods. So, at least when it comes to the narrow
question of the most efficient way to teach a very young child to
read, we are ultimately being asked to compare vague theorizing
against a growing list of individual success stories. You might
dismiss the latter as “anecdotal evidence,” but only if I am allowed
to dismiss your naturalism and constructivism as “vague
philosophical speculation.”
The fact of the matter is that nobody is going to be convinced by
debating either the anecdotal evidence or the speculation. What
are really needed are carefully-controlled, long-term longitudinal
studies of these programs. I predict that such studies will
8. The creative free play objection
demonstrate that children generally benefit by being taught to
read at a very early age. I don’t know that the studies will have
those results, obviously; but it certainly seems like a very
reasonable position to take, before the actual study results arrive.
(More on that in Section 12.)
It’s worth mentioning another important objection, similar to but
not quite the same as the foregoing, which I especially associate
with the Unschooling movement. Some parents and educators,
especially those involved in alternative schooling, feel that it is
deeply important that we let our children discover (or construct)
knowledge for themselves as much as they can. It is best if they
do so apart from any prescribed curriculum, following their
interests instead. In this way, not only do they gain a deeper
understanding due to their personal interest and motivation, they
learn the important lesson that life is what we make it, and
ultimately we choose our own way. If we teach our children
directly, we rob them of the opportunity to learn for themselves.
They feel bored and pressured—or so goes the argument—and
that is not conducive to solid learning and independence. Not
only is it an instance of much-hated direct instruction, it is
supposed to rob very young children of time and energy they
should use to get out exploring and learning from the world firsthand. I think this is why teaching children to read at an early age,
and in other ways “accelerating” their learning, has been
obnoxious to a few Unschoolers I have come across online who
have commented on it. (They may have been Unschooling
purists.)
There are actually two operative principles and objections here,
which I want to discuss separately. One principle is (1) children
should be allowed to choose their own interests as much as
possible—an issue of curriculum. The corresponding objection is
that small children might not or cannot choose to be taught how
to read, and we should not “force” them to learn. The other
principle is (2) children learn best when teaching themselves,
constructing knowledge for themselves—an issue of educational
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method. The corresponding objection is that flashcards and
videos are instances of the much-despised “direct instruction.”
To (1) there is a straightforward reply: babies and toddlers are
generally “easy” when it comes to choice of subject matter. Unlike
older children, most of them do not have special topics that they
are passionately interested in pursuing. This is not to say that they
don’t have preferences and favorites—of course they do—but
they can be typically entertained in many different ways. Most
things are fascinating to them. For this reason, babyhood and
toddlerhood are arguably the “prime time” to teach reading.
I was able to do it when my boy was sitting at the dinner table
(admittedly a captive audience) by running my finger under the
words as I read many books to him, and also by showing him
flashcards. Resistance to instruction—and to everything—becomes
more of a problem in the “terrible twos” and increasingly
independent preschool years. (At age four, my boy is one of the
most independent kids you can imagine. Learning a lot in his early
years did not serve to drain his spirit—quite the opposite!)
But even then it is very possible to develop interest in a topic, as
every good teacher knows. Well-chosen videos, attractive
nonfiction and fiction books, and other media can spark interest
in a subject. So can well-designed experiments, demonstrations,
field trips, and toys. Of course, the way to spark an interest in
reading itself is to read a tremendous amount to children when
they’re little—most children love it—and then they quite naturally
gain some curiosity about letters and words and books. As for
Your Baby Can Read and Doman flash cards in particular, I’ve seen
many parents praising these methods precisely because they are so
exciting to their children. The parent in these cases is very far
from foisting a subject on an unwilling student. Of course, not all
children are equally enthusiastic; for some who have written on
online forums, YBCR and Doman flashcards leave their children
cold. But again, both Titzer and Doman speak strongly against
foisting their materials on any resisting child.
8. The creative free play objection
A full discussion of (2) rests on the whole constructivism-vs.direct instruction debate, which I cannot take the time to engage.
But I will say this much: speaking in broad generalities, there is
little wrong with teaching children directly, per se. Children
frequently want direct instruction (evidence: they ask lots of
questions and are impatient if we do not answer them directly;
many of them love books, which teach them directly). If done
right, direct instruction can increase their curiosity, not kill it.
Indeed, I would argue that one cannot become a well-educated
person without spending many thousands of hours receiving
“direct instruction” in the form of book-reading.
Ultimately, children—and all of us—want to study things that
they can take an active interest in. It is their interest, the
“romance” they have with a subject, which primes them to absorb
knowledge, creates their curiosity, and fires them up to ask
questions and seek out answers. At bottom, such interest does not
require “constructing knowledge.” But the converse is true, that
is, a desire to learn for oneself, or to “construct knowledge,”
requires an active interest in a subject. The great appeal of
Unschooling is precisely that it respects the fact that students
learn best when pursuing their own interests. But an excellent
teacher, or parent, takes the time to cultivate a child’s interests,
does not insist that he study something currently uninteresting,
and feeds his active interests “directly.” That, anyway, is what I try
to do with my own little boy. We also do our share of
experiments and exploration as well, and I ask him thoughtprovoking questions all the time, of course. I respect his interests
greatly and I feed them, and when he shows no desire to study
something, I underemphasize that.
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9. The conceptual maturity objection
What’s the rush? Won’t reading skills will be better learned later,
when children are ready to take it on board? Earlier does not equal
better. After all, children who absorb relatively advanced knowledge
at an early age will have to use immature faculties, or conceptual
storehouses, for doing so. They will not be able to understand what
they read well enough.
The notion of educational readiness, and reading readiness in
particular, has been around for a long time. Back in 1957, Dolores
Durkin was able to do an extensive review of a then-already vast
literature on the subject, as she reports in Children Who Read Early.
The very notion of reading readiness seems to imply an objection
to very early reading: children are usually “ready to read” around
ages 5-7, so babies and toddlers are of course not ready.
To develop this objection, I’ll examine a recent example. Trevor
Cairney, in a very useful blog post, finds three researchers who
“are amongst those who have stressed that children need time and
appropriate learning strategies to develop normally. [David]
Elkind also warned against the temptation to pressure children
with simplified learning tasks at a very young age which inevitably
end up relying on lower-level cognitive processes such as
memorisation, repetition and simple word and sound recognition
that could ultimately be at the expense of activities with greater
richness and complexity.”
I find this personally interesting. I found that, by introducing
words systematically on flashcards, my son learned those words
very well and used them frequently in conversation. Moreover,
after a wide variety of early literacy activities in the first three years
of life, he was able to appreciate books like Stuart Little by his
third birthday: we read it only when he was enthusiastic about
reading it, and we finished it fairly quickly. The sorts of
conversations we had about our reading—the questions he asked
and answered, and the advanced grammatical constructions he
used (would you believe the subjunctive mood at age 3?)—belie
9. The conceptual maturity objection
the suggestion that learning to read early would harm his facility
with language. So really, what should I make of the claim that
early reading will “ultimately be at the expense of activities with
greater [literacy-building] richness and complexity”?
Perhaps I am not responding to Cairney’s point, but this is partly
because his point is not altogether clear. When he worries that
early reading methods are used “at the expense of activities with
greater richness and complexity,” what “activities” does he mean?
Suppose the point were merely that the time spent in learning to
read with YBCR could be better spent by, just for example,
reading books. This would actually be a puzzling thing to say,
because I have typically spent over an hour a day (all together)
reading to my boy, and the total time spent watching YBCR or on
flashcards was a miniscule fraction of our total “literacy” related
activities. Is the point is that we should have spent the time we
used on YBCR and on flashcards on more reading? I am very
skeptical that he would be farther along in his language abilities in
that case. After all, he can read now, and that opens up books and
other texts to him in daily life and when neither his mother nor I
have time to read to him.
If the point is, instead, that a child’s reading ability will suffer
simply because it is based on “lower-level cognitive processes
such as memorization,” I suppose he might mean that children
will develop habits of memorizing whole words and fail to learn
phonics. Indeed I must concede something here to Cairney: in
discussions with parents on BrillKids.com and the
TeachYourBabyToRead mailing list, I have sometimes come
across parents who say that they started their babies with YBCR
or Doman flashcards, and their children seem to be limited to the
words they have memorized. Some, not all, of the children do not
seem to be breaking the phonetic code, yet. The typical advice
that I see and give in these forums to try a phonics program.
Indeed, my son learned phonics very well beginning at age 22
months, so that by age 3½, he was able to decode the Preamble
and the First Amendment of the Constitution (not understand these
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texts, of course). Some months after I first posted them, quite a
few parents have praised my phonics flashcards because they have
given their children progress that was not available to them using
only other early reading programs.
So Cairney’s point might have some purchase for “whole word”only programs (his blog post was directed at YBCR). But as I and
several other parents in early reading groups have decided, it is
possible to supplement those programs with more systematic
phonics, and at a surprisingly early age, too.
I suspect that our critics may also have a simple either-or choice
in mind: either the educational videos and flashcards, or books and
creative play. Given that choice, I too would opt instantly for the
latter. I think books are far and away the most important element
to emphasize in education. This choice might make sense if you
are choosing between very imperfect preschools. But when it
comes to evaluating at-home education methods, the choice is of
course a false alternative; we may do all of these things with gusto,
in a way that our children can actually appreciate and learn from.
That the approach I took.
To this, I believe the critics of early reading might want to reply,
“That’s very nice for you, but most working parents do not have
the luxury of spending so much time with their children. If they
watch educational videos, they will pat themselves on the back for
doing something educational with their kids, and good enough.
They will not engage in the sort of rich literacy activities that you
have. So for them, time spent on flashcards and videos is
essentially time taken away from creative play. For them, there
really is more of an either-or situation.”
If that’s the reply, then I want to know on what basis this
characterization is made. Unlike most critics of early reading
programs, I have spent many, many hours conversing online with
parents who use these programs. Rarely does such a parent
complain that she does not have time to read to her children, and
9. The conceptual maturity objection
it’s either one or the other. I do recall one such person, a single
working mother, I think; she was asking the community for advice
about how to spend the precious few hours after getting the kids
home from daycare, and I opined that she should spend the time
on reading. But she was a rare case. I think most people who
invest in tools like YBCR are committed to creating home
environments of rich literacy. It is bizarre for our critics to assume
otherwise: if we are trying to teach our babies to read, of all things, it
should not be hard to assume that we are creating rich literacy
experiences.
Jane M. Healy offers a related argument in her excellent
introduction to child developmental psychology for parents, Your
Child’s Growing Mind (p. 266f). Healy’s version of the argument
may be one of the strongest in our critics’ arsenal. She says that
full-fledged reading, as opposed to mere decoding without really
getting the words one is mouthing, requires a rich storehouse of
vocabulary and concepts, which are not well developed for most
children until they are of the usual reading age. Until a child is able
not only to decode but really comprehend a text, asking the child
to read that text will be very dry, mechanical, and unrewarding.
Such a child, if asked to read texts he cannot really appreciate, will
come to associate reading with confusion, difficulty, and above all
boredom.
I concede much of this argument. It speaks to the personal
experience of all of us—who likes to read dry stuff he can’t
understand? It speaks to memories of our own childhoods, being
asked to read books that are too difficult for us, not
understanding many words. It also describes my experience with
my own son, on those few occasions when I have asked him to
read texts that were well above his level. While at first he would
seem to revel in his ability simply to decode the text, after a few
sentences he lost patience for the task, and he seemed rather
disgusted and would refuse to go on.
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As persuasive as this argument seems, it does not clinch the
ultimate conclusion that children should not be taught to read as
babies and toddlers. This disconnect is for several reasons. First
and most importantly, I believe that many parents who use early
reading methods (not all, I’m sure) also read a tremendous
amount to their children, and are deeply concerned about keeping
their children’s motivation high. So it is reasonable to assume that
such parents rarely ask their children to read books they cannot
take on board. Second, both Doman and Titzer have methods
and tools for rapidly increasing vocabulary, for growing “the
mental garden” to use Healy’s phrase. Also, BrillKids and its
support community have developed a huge number of
vocabulary-boosting presentations, and I have tried to do the
same thing with my PowerPoint presentations. Healy does not
seem to take into account that developing the ability to
comprehend texts is a crucial part of many early learning
programs.
Third, consider the fact that my son, like other early readers I’ve
come across online, avidly reads from certain books by himself.
Evidently, when I’m not reading to him, or asking him to read
something to me, he finds his own level. If reading were a dry,
boring task for him, he would not sit down with copies of Magic
Tree House books, as he has done, and flip through them to reread the parts he liked. (And no, he was not just looking at the
pictures. I often watched his eyes making saccades: he’s reading
the words, a lot of them.) I do not think that my boy is unusual in
this regard; other parents with early readers report that theirs do
pick up books on their own and take a lively interest in books. In
short, I believe that my boy and others like him can understand
pretty well the sorts of texts he is personally attracted to. I am not
claiming that he can always answer the sorts of “reading
comprehension” questions that are asked of, say, third-graders in
their Language Arts units. (For what it’s worth, by his fourth
birthday, he could answer the “Brain Quest” reading
comprehension questions for first graders pretty well.) My point is
9. The conceptual maturity objection
that he wouldn’t be spending a lot of time with these books, on
his own, if he didn’t get a lot out of them.
So I can’t agree with Healy’s ultimate conclusion. But her point is
well taken as far as it goes. A child should not be asked to read
what he cannot understand, and there might be problems if a
parent insists on teaching a child to read without also doing a
tremendous amount of reading and other vocabulary-building
activities. For me, these have been crucial take-aways from our
experience and my own amateur study.
In email to me, Healy put her argument another way, in terms of
brain science. Mature reading is an activity done with the frontal
lobe, which is not developed in under-fives. Hence, we can expect
that children will do more “word calling” because their reading is
done with the temporal and occipital lobes, which are limited
areas of the brain (posterior areas). If a child learns with those
more limited areas of the brain, the worry is that he may be stuck
on that level, and not read with the higher, more sophisticated
processes that will develop later in the frontal lobe.
Not being a brain scientist, I don’t pretend to be able to answer
this properly, and so will only suggest a few possible replies. First,
if this worry were valid, we would expect to see many cases in
which kids began reading at an early age and ended up being
stunted in their academic growth later on. But I haven’t
encountered any evidence of such cases, and the anecdotal
evidence is heavily to the contrary. In any case, the analysis of
what’s going on in the brains of early readers is speculative, and if
longitudinal studies reveal that very early readers do better than
their peers in the long run, we need not worry so much about
what is going on “under the hood.”
Second, my understanding is that the brain is very plastic, and as
new areas of the brain “come online,” so to speak, there are rapid
periods of development in which they are hooked up to what is
already there. Then it is just a matter of connecting up the
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reflective abilities of the frontal lobe with the simpler, but efficient
abilities of the posterior areas, where Healy says decoding is done
in early-reader brains. Perhaps, if early readers are unusually quick
readers—as my son is turning out to be and as other parents
report of their own—the fact that they use more “limited” areas
of the brain to do the decoding is an advantage. (But again, I am
only guessing; I am no expert on this stuff, as Dr. Healy is.)
However all that is, I wish a researcher would survey
(longitudinally!) the parents of children who have little readers
who can read books aloud. It seems to me that there a
straightforward research question to ask here: how much does
your early reader read alone or to you? Does your little reader
actually pick up books and read them? Does he or she read them
to you, or alone, silently or out loud? This would indicate
something about how well they understand what they read,
because no child is going to be motivated to read much of what
he does not understand.
Here is my answer: every day, my little boy has a book in hand
and is thumbing through it by himself. His habit of doing this
varies from day to day and week to week; sometimes he always
seems to have a book in hand, while other times, it’s something
else (usually a Lego creation). He tends to “read” more in the
mornings, I’ve noticed. He frequently totes around a book I’ve
recently finished reading to him. He still occasionally picks up a
book and reads some to his mother. For example, shortly after his
fourth birthday he was reading to her a little from my copy of
Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy, of all things. (I haven’t read this to
him; he just grabbed it from a bookshelf.) But for whatever
reason, he doesn’t read so much to me. My hypothesis is that he
does not want me to stop reading to him, so when he reads to me,
that makes him nervous. Also, it is much more entertaining for
me to read to him than vice-versa. For me he’ll occasionally read
bits and pieces we’re reading together; for example, he routinely
reads all of Jack’s notes from the Magic Tree House books, as
well as the last page of whatever book we read. For a while
9. The conceptual maturity objection
around his fourth birthday, there was a little “naughty” thing he
did—at mealtimes, I stopped my reading in order to take a bite,
and he would grab the book and read ahead silently and then gets
a sly look on his face. Then he would ask a question about what
he’d just read. I suspect he did this to prove that he could read
faster than I was reading to him.
Unfortunately, one thing he rarely does is to sit down by himself,
without being asked, and read a book from beginning to end.
When he was three, he did that probably only a half-dozen times
that I know of. He never read a chapter book by himself from
beginning to end until just past his fourth birthday.
While writing this, I decided to do an informal, unscientific
survey. I asked parents on BrillKids.com to report their early
readers’ self-reading behavior. One mother said, “My soon-to-be
2 year old likes to read with me (she reads while I point out the
words) and also likes to read alone.” Another wrote: “When she is
reading with me, she will read maybe 20-25% of the books aloud,
if I use my finger to help her follow the sentences. These books
are about a Level 1 reader (about 1-3 sentences per page, 5-8
words per sentence, again less than 10-12 pages long). … I would
say that 99% of reading is initiated by my dd [daughter], she is the
one bringing books to me, or asking me to sit and read with her.”
As for us, in June 2010 just after turning four, my boy brought
two Berenstain Bears books to the table and read them silently to
himself, refusing to be read to. Some days later, I decided to sit
down on my own reading chair and read a big thick book, and so
soon my son had brought Magic Tree House #3, Pirates Past Noon,
to the chair and re-read the first six chapters. As far as I can tell,
he didn’t skip anything. A week later he decided to read to me,
quite enthusiastically, the entire 63-page Usborne version of
Beowulf at bedtime, complete with voices. So he seems to be
gradually becoming an independent reader—and so, presumably,
a reader increasingly capable of understanding what he reads.
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10. The sapped-motivation objection
Reading before a child’s brain is developmentally ready will sap the
child’s motivation. Won’t the child end up being confused,
frustrated, and unmotivated despite everyone’s good intentions?
Here is another way into the many-sided “reading readiness”
objection. A child who is asked to read when he is not yet ready
will inevitably have a bad experience and—this is the point—be
turned off to reading. He will lose motivation to read and to learn.
So early teaching of reading is actually self-stultifying: it defeats
the very goal of excellent literacy skills. While the previous
objection concerned the effectiveness of early reading on
comprehension, the present one focuses on the impact of early
reading on motivation.
This worry is articulated in this article, for example. The concern
there is actually about kindergartners who are having a rough time
decoding text.
The article’s source is Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax (a very
interesting recent book, by the way). In Chapter 2, Sax articulates
a common criticism of acceleration: children, especially boys, who
are not developmentally ready to begin learning to read are
frustrated by attempts to make them read. They would rather play.
Such boys are often put in the slow group, and the teacher spends
more time with the “smarter” kids, while the “slower” kids,
mostly boys, get the message that the teacher dislikes them and
finds them stupid. They are discouraged from the very start
precisely because of inappropriate acceleration. To clinch his point,
Sax trots out an old warhorse, Finland, whose students begin
reading at age seven and yet beat American students hands-down
by their teen years. Sax suggests that the reason Finns read better
later on is that they are all “ready” at age 7, so the kids who would
have been turned off at age 5, in the American system, have a
positive outlook toward school when they start later.
10. The sapped-motivation objection
There are many things to say here; I will go through them quickly
rather than risk tedium. First, Sax’s explanation for the Finnish
difference—that
Finnish
children
are
taught
when
“developmentally ready”—is not the only possible explanation.
Another is that Finns are taught a great deal of vocabulary at
home before they go to school, and two years in a Finnish home
at ages 5 and 6 might well be worth much more, educationally,
than two years in an American school at the same ages. It is, after
all, now well-known that home schoolers achieve better academic
results than their traditionally schooled counterparts; for a review
of some of the research, see this article. Another point is that,
traditionally, English language schools begin teaching reading
earlier than some other languages like Finnish precisely because,
unlike those other languages, English is much less of a phonetic
language.
I must also mention that common American methods of teaching
reading cannot be ruled out as explaining the differences in
outcomes. As Durkin points out in her teacher textbook, Teaching
Young Children to Read,
[Y]oung children can become readers in ways that are
playful and interesting to them. … [But] a growing number
of kindergartens—for both good and questionable
reasons—were beginning to teach reading using procedures
that did not seem to take into account the age of the
children… The result for these kindergartens is a
preponderance of whole class instruction depending mostly
on basal readers, workbooks, and drill, with little or no
attention being given to the obvious fact of great
differences among any group of five year olds. (pp. 4-5)
Note that Sax barely mentions the teaching of reading to
preschoolers, much less babies; his focus is on the relatively
recent practice of teaching reading to kindergartners rather than
first graders, and his argument rests on the contention that the
kids who are exposed too early to reading instruction do not
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successfully learn to read. But what conclusion can be drawn from that
about children who do successfully learn to read by age two?
None. Indeed, as Durkin stated in her classic studies of early
readers, Children Who Read Early (published 1966), “Even after six
years of school instruction in reading, the early readers [i.e., those
who learn to read before entering kindergarten], as a group,
maintained their lead in achievement over classmates of the same
mental age who did not begin to read until the first grade.”
(p. 133) In other words, the students that Sax is describing are
those who struggle with reading at an early age—not those who
have success.
But, you might ask, how could such tiny students possibly fail to
struggle, much more than kindergartners, of course? It so happens
Sax wrote something very much to that point:
It now appears that the language areas of the brain in many
five-year-old boys look like the language areas of the brain
of the average three-and-a-half-year-old girl. Have you ever
tried to teach a three-and-a-half-year-old girl to read? It’s
frustrating, both for the teacher and for the girl. It’s simply
not developmentally appropriate, to use the jargon of early
childhood educators. You’re asking her to do something
that her brain is just not yet ready to do.
Trying to teach five-year-old boys to learn to read and write
may be just as inappropriate as it would be to try to teach
three-year-old girls to read and write. Timing is everything,
in education as in many other fields. (p. 18)
Such arguments are going through the minds of some critics when
they hear suggestions that you “teach your baby to read.” These
arguments are rooted in experience, but experience that is largely
irrelevant. Of course if you try to teach babies and toddlers in the
way that six-year-olds are traditionally taught—with textbooks and
worksheets, or software that emulates the same thing—then they
might well be completely puzzled and frustrated. But that, of
11. The “miseducation” objection
course, is not our suggestion. Our suggestion is that you follow
methods that have been used with good success with babies and
toddlers, as discussed in Part 1. As bizarre as it may sound at first,
it is actually easy for many babies to learn to read with these
methods. It needn’t be a struggle, and it can even be fun.
11. The “miseducation” objection
Giving formal instruction at too early an age is “miseducation.” If
nothing else, it kills the natural curiosity of children when they are
forced to do what bores or confuses them. Doesn’t teaching babies
or toddlers just compound the errors of the whole misguided
“academic preschool” trend?
I associate this objection, closely related to the foregoing,
especially with David Elkind. Elkind claims, in Chapter 1 of his
book Miseducation: Preschoolers at Risk: “No authority in the field of
child psychology, pediatrics, or child psychiatry advocates the
formal instruction, in any domain, of infants and young children.”
(p. 8) This would seem to be a very serious count against baby
reading programs. The criticism makes heavy use of the notion of
“formal instruction,” which I will analyze here in some detail.
Elkind bemoans two things: (1) the tendency to put very young
children into formal learning classes (such as academic
preschools), and (2) home programs like Doman’s (he cites
several others as well) which feature a formal training element.
These are, however, very different, and Elkind’s book does not
evince an understanding of the relevant differences.
I am no great fan of academic preschools; my wife and I did not
have the slightest desire to send our boy to one. I find myself
agreeing with Elkind that much academic preschooling probably
constitutes “miseducation,” and for just the reasons he offers. I
mean preschools that generally teach students together in groups,
doing similar things at the same time, prescribing subjects and
activities, and otherwise directing the children to learn what
teachers (or the preschool franchise’s central office) prescribe,
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regardless of their individual desires and abilities. One of my
personal pet peeves about educational content is that the sort of
materials developed for teachers to use with groups of youngsters
tend to be carefully contrived and repetitive, to make sure that
everyone from a diverse group of children learns all the concepts.
But the systematicity and repetitiveness also makes the materials
boring and requires a long attention span, and is therefore exactly
the wrong thing to inflict on preschoolers. Elkind very plausibly
claims that a child forced in a group situation to learn with such
materials could cause “psychological damage” (p. 14) in the sense
of interfering with the child’s healthy self-esteem and motivation
to learn later on.
But I fail to see what this has to do with teaching an individual
child at home to read with flashcards and videos—particularly
when the parent insures that the child is interested in the
materials, as ours was. Insofar as Elkind’s is primarily an objection
to the academic preschool trend, and in favor of “let little kids do
what they want” child care, it really seems irrelevant to the
teaching of reading as I’ve done it with my own boy.
Elkind, however, spends several pages arguing that Doman, and
some others who have written books explaining how to build
your baby’s brain, also uses potentially harmful “formal
education” methods. My question is what exactly is “formal” about
methods like Doman’s, or for that matter the methods that I have
used? And more to the point, in exactly what ways does the
“formality” of these methods threaten some psychological harm?
To establish his point, Elkind takes from several quotes from
early education curriculum designers (on pp. 11-13) that make
their methods sound awfully “formal,” in the sense of artificial or
contrived, involving several steps that require the child’s
cooperation (or at least engagement). For example, from Doman
he quotes these instructions:
11. The “miseducation” objection
Now simply hold up the word mummy, just beyond his
reach, and say to him clearly, “This says Mummy.”
Give the child no more description and do not
elaborate. Permit him to see it for ten seconds.
Now play with him, give him your undivided
attention for a minute or two, then present the word again
for the second time. …
I am not going to try to defend Doman’s specific methods here.
Doman’s books offer what look to me like unnecessary levels of
prescriptive detail. I, like most of the parents I’ve talked to online
about Doman’s methods, take his specific recommendations as
broad hints at best. But the methods themselves are very much
like play, as you can see even by reading the supposedly-damning
quotation from Doman above.
Does this, and actual practices of baby- and toddler-teaching
parents, constitute “formal instruction” in the sense that Elkind
finds dangerous? Unfortunately, Elkind never defines the term, at
least not in Miseducation. Again, I wonder: was I necessarily
engaging in “formal instruction” when, for a couple minutes, I
showed my little boy some flash cards, and he read them to me?
I don’t think so. It was more like a game.
There is no need to focus further on that word, because Elkind
helpfully offers (p. 10) a list of five “concerns” about formal early
education, endorsed by a roster of early education organizations
(see The Early Childhood and Literacy Development Committee
of the International Reading Association, 1986). Let us see which
of these five points, if any, make sense to apply to Doman’s
method, Titzer’s, or the eclectic method I followed. The indented
text that follows is quoted from Elkind’s own summary of the
statement.
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1. Many pre-first-grade children are subjected to rigid
formal prereading programs with inappropriate
expectations and experiences for their level of
development.
I’ll examine the language here in some detail (my apologies if this
is tedious). First, the accusation of “inappropriate expectations” is
question-begging in this context: we are examining the whole
issue of whether it is appropriate to expect babies to learn to read
using the programs in question. So let us put “inappropriate
expectations” aside. Then we have only to ask whether, in the
baby reading programs under examination, children are subjected
to something “rigid” and “formal.” The notions of rigidity and
formality are very slippery and vague. Again, showing some
flashcards that are interesting to the child, or showing an
entertaining video, does not strike me as doing something
necessarily rigid or formal. It can be like a game, not a chore.
Moreover, being “subjected” means that a child is either resisting
or is not fully on board, anyway. But all the methods under
discussion are quite clear: if the child is not enthusiastic about the
learning experience, don’t do it. If a baby is cooing excitedly, or a
toddler is looking on with evident interest, it is misleading to say
they are being “subjected” to something.
2. Little attention is given to individual development and
individual learning styles.
This might, perhaps, be made as a criticism of Doman’s methods,
because they are relatively prescriptive, and it is difficult to tell
whether a baby is absorbing the information until he or she begins
to talk. But even in that case the criticism is not very strong,
because the teaching is one-on-one, and instruction occurs only
when the children are enthusiastic about it. The criticism simply
does not apply to Titzer’s videos and other materials, because
Titzer advises parents to use a wide variety of early literacy
experiences. The approach I’ve taken with my own boy is even
more eclectic; I actively seek out what seems to be working best.
11. The “miseducation” objection
He happened to be really enthusiastic about YBCR and was quite
taken with my phonics flashcards, which I imagine means these
tools were coherent with his “individual learning style.”
3. The pressures of accelerated programs do not allow
children to be risk takers as they experiment with language
and internalized concepts about how language operates.
This item appears to be irrelevant to the early reading methods.
The notion that the early reading methods discussed “do not
allow children to be risk takers,” etc., is a non-starter. It seems to
be describing preschool group work and classroom instruction,
rather than one-on-one programs. Indeed, the pattern I have seen
in my own child and that of other children I read about online is
that learning how to decode text emboldens children’s use of
language. My boy has used words he came across in reading, and,
by the time he was three, he picked up any reading material lying
about (such as advertisements or advanced books) confidently
and gave it a try. He is also an absolute chatterbox and was
constantly “experimenting” with language. Why would the use of
programs like Doman’s or Titzer’s make this less likely, rather than
more?
4. Too much attention is focused on isolated skill
development or abstract parts of the reading process, rather
than upon the integration of oral language, writing, and
listening with reading.
This criticism might seem to have more purchase because learning
to decode text—and, especially, inducting specific phonetic rules
from many examples—does constitute focusing on “isolated skill
development.” There are several things to say here, but in the
interests of brevity I will raise only the most important: this is a
false alternative. It was entirely possible for me to spend a few
minutes per day during meals to show my boy some flash cards,
and in the rest of the time (which was, all together, much more
of the time) reading to him, talking with him, helping him to
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scribble, etc. These activities all together constituted integrated
language training. If a parent were to do no other early literacy
training than watching YBCR, or flashing some flashcards, then
I would agree that this point would have some purchase: the
programs would appear to be “formal” to that extent. But surely,
it is not merely wrong in most cases, it is also insulting, to assume
that parents who go to the trouble of teaching their little ones to
read do not also routinely take the time to give them various other
rich language experiences.
5. Too little attention is placed upon reading for pleasure;
therefore children do not associate reading with enjoyment.
This point seems to describe what goes on in group settings, in
which a teacher (or central office) picks a book that she hopes
many of the kids will like. We have seen this in library reading
times, which we have attended occasionally: the books are very
hit-and-miss. Some librarians are pretty good at picking likeable
books, but the unavoidable fact is that tastes even among little
kids differ greatly.
My child seems to associate reading with enjoyment. I think that is
because I never read anything to him that he does not say “yes”
to, and I ask him to bring me books to read. I see no indication
that other parents of very young readers often take a different
approach.
To conclude this section, having carefully examined Elkind’s
proffered list of criticisms of too-early “formal instruction,” I find
that few or none of the criticisms has any purchase against the
early reading practices described in this essay. The criticisms seem
to be designed with group work in academic preschools in mind.
The early reading programs discussed in this essay do not seem to
constitute “formal instruction” in the sense Elkind described.
12. Does early reading really have long-term advantages?
12. Does early reading really have long-term
advantages?
It’s probably pointless. Won’t other kids catch up when they’re
ready? Are there really any long-term academic gains?
Perhaps the most difficult objection is this: learning to read very
early is pointless because it has no long-term gains. Children of
comparable ability and background will quickly catch up when
they are ready.
Such definitive claims are frequently made, but without evidence.
In fact, hard-nosed evidence is lacking on both sides of the
question.
Advocates of very early reading frequently claim that, by learning
to decode the language, kids are given a definite long-term benefit.
By learning to read at age two, for example—three or four years
before they might start to learn in school—they increase their
vocabulary and store of concepts, and begin to read books on
their own, long before they would otherwise do so. They arrive in
first grade not only able to read, but decoding at (for example) the
sixth grade level. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence of this sort
of thing.
Maybe it will help to explain this anecdotal argument a little more.
Titzer and some other early childhood learning advocates state
that the golden years for brain development and related learning,
including language learning, are the first five years of life. YBCR is
supposed to leverage children’s abilities in those years. As Titzer
wrote to me, his company has received “thousands of
testimonials” and many indicate reading age level of children in
school. Based on that data, Titzer wrote, “It appears rare for a
baby to learn to read and not be at least several years ahead in
reading when entering school.” In other words, based on the
testimonials, starting earlier doesn’t slow down the rate of
learning, it accelerates it.
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Of course, we need to know how many kids using YBCR were
included in Titzer’s data, what the standard deviation is, or what
the data from a proper control group might look like—important
things to know to assess his claim. For what it’s worth, his
daughter Aleka entered college two years early, at 16, and his
younger daughter has skipped a grade as well. But Titzer, having
earned a Ph.D., no doubt passed on some “smart genes.” Titzer’s
data might also be skewed by all sorts of things, which ought to
come out in peer review. He presented some interesting
longitudinal case study data at the International Conference on
Infant Studies back in 1998, but this was never published.
Again, the trouble on both sides of this question is that the matter
simply has not yet been carefully examined in published, peerreviewed studies.
But, a well-informed person might point out, what about the
studies by Dolores Durkin?
In 1966, Durkin published the results of much empirical work in
Children Who Read Early: Two Longitudinal Studies. Durkin followed
two groups of children who had learned to read at home before
Kindergarten; there were 49 students from Oakland in the first
group and 156 students from New York City in the second. The
Oakland study followed students for six years, beginning in
Kindergarten. The boys went from a median reading grade-level
of 2.1 to 7.9, six years later, and the girls went from 1.9 to 9.6.
Significantly for my purposes in this essay, 13 of these children
started at age 3, 22 at age 4, and 14 at age 5; the children who
started at age 3 ended up with the highest average reading grade
level six years later (9.2), which was over 1.5 grade levels above
the students who started at age 4 or 5, and much higher than
students who began at more normal ages. Though the data are
very slender of course, they do seem to indicate that the younger
one begins to read, the higher one’s reading level will be in the
sixth grade. (These results are reported in pp. 12-28.)
12. Does early reading really have long-term advantages?
Somewhat similar results were found for the New Yorkers,
although the study covered only three years. The boys and girls
achieved virtually identical results, with median reading grade-level
of 2.0 in Kindergarten and 6.1 in the third grade.
The fact that many of these children skipped a grade supports the
contention that the children were, in fact, academically benefitted
by their early reading abilities: 15 of the 49 Oakland students had
skipped a grade after five years (p. 34), and 25 of the 156 New
York students had skipped a grade after three years (p. 81).
Another small longitudinal study of early readers was done in
Great Britain, covering ages 5-7. (See Rhona Stainthorp and
Diana Hughes, Learning from Children Who Read at an Early Age—
this book may be of special interest in that it actually gives a pagelong case history for each of the 15 early readers.) This study
involved 29 readers, 15 of them early readers. On tests of reading
accuracy the early readers went from reading at age levels of 8.5 at
age 5 to 11.08 at age 7 (three to four years ahead), and from 7.0 to
9.5 in comprehension (two years ahead). In these and all other
measures, the early readers were already gaining more than one age
level per year—the linguistically rich, so to speak, getting richer, at
least for a few years.
In a 2004 follow-up study, Stainthorp and Hughes gave a status
update about 28 of the children. At age 11, the early readers
continued to enjoy an advantage: “precocious reading ability does
not wash out and…the precocious readers maintained an
advantage by the end of the primary school years.” (p. 363) In
other words, “The data presented here show that the precocious
readers did indeed maintain their advantage. This was the case for
word reading on all the standardised measures given, as well as
reading rate and reading comprehension.” (p. 366) The “Matthew
effect,” or the rich-get-richer effect, did not continue for this
group, however. The group’s advantage narrowed when it came to
reading accuracy, i.e., ability to sound out words; in the other
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measures, reading speed and reading comprehension, the
advantage remained largely the same six years on.
These are not the only studies of precocious readers. Other
studies have produced similar results, as one can discover in an
excellent review article, “Precocious Readers: Past, Present, and
Future,” which appeared in 2006 in the Journal for the Education of
the Gifted. Another recent study (Tafa and Manolitsis 2008) also
gives a nice overview of the field and goes on to support the
notion that it is the irregularity of the English language that
accounts for the superior phonological awareness of early readers.
Learning to read in the much more phonetic Greek language,
early-reading Greek children enjoyed several advantages like their
English counterparts, but their phonological awareness scores
were the same as non-precocious readers by the end of first grade.
This body of research does appear to provide some support for
the claim that children who enter school already able to read will
retain some advantages later on. But one must not get too excited
about this; three critical observations are relevant.
First, I wish I could conclude that similar results will be borne out
for children who began reading at age 0-2. But in fact, Durkin’s
studies concerned only children who began to read at ages 3-5,
and there might be significant differences between early readers
and very early readers. I wouldn’t be surprised if some researchers
claimed that the brains of the “natural” early readers are unusually
well-developed, so that they can begin to start using the higher
brain functions needed to grasp language. The situation might be
much different for a baby whose higher brain functions are
undeveloped, and who relies on lower brain functions to
memorize a lot of words.
Secondly, most of the children in Durkin’s studies were selfstarters and not taught by anything like Doman’s or Titzer’s
methods. They obviously had to receive some sort of “training”—
for example, a sibling or family friend explaining some reading
12. Does early reading really have long-term advantages?
mnemonics, the parent answering frequent questions about what
word says what, or just running a finger under the text as it is
being read, Atticus Finch-style. But generally, the children learned
to read because they felt personally motivated to learn. As
Stainthorp and Hughes (2004) put it, “these children were not
hot-housed at home but had genuinely capitalised on their
positive home environments to teach themselves.” (p. 370) By
contrast, children who began to read as babies or toddlers would
not necessarily have become reading self-starters without their
special training. This could be an important difference (although,
personally, I doubt it).
Thirdly, many of the children in the Durkin studies who read early
were of high intelligence; the median intelligence of the Oakland
group was 121 while the New York group was 133. That
admitted, in both groups, Durkin also compared groups (or
subgroups) of early readers to non-early readers with a similar
median IQ. In both studies, Durkin concluded that, even
controlling for IQ, being an early reader was significantly
correlated with higher reading scores after six, or three, years
(see pp. 39-41 and pp. 82-6).
Although studies of ordinary precocious readers are interesting
and somewhat relevant, there really isn’t enough proof
demonstrating that children who receive direct training in reading
as babies or toddlers experience long-term benefit from doing so.
And there are certainly no long-term longitudinal studies,
following very early readers all the way through their educational
careers.
Lack of empirical proof is something Kathy Hirsh-Pasek pointed
to when she was interviewed for a long feature article in the Boston
Globe from a few years back: “There is no data showing their
[Doman-trained] kids are doing any better than other kids with
highly motivated parents,” she said. “And they’re not producing
Olympic athletes or Nobel laureates, or you can be sure we’d be
hearing about it.”
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It is easy to concede that precise point; my own literature search
bears out what Hirsh-Pasek says. But perhaps of some interest is a
book published by the Institutes for the Advancement of Human
Potential (Doman’s organization) that purports to give the success
stories for those who went through the Doman program (Neil
Harvey, Kids Who Start Ahead, Stay Ahead) and who were,
presumably, all very early readers. I read most of the book. There
certainly seem to be a lot of Doman-trained kids that are doing
well, and a lot of proud parents. I gather also that many Domantrained kids have grown up to become successful professionals.
But this is not surprising in the least, considering how much their
parents evidently prized knowledge. The biggest problem with the
book was exactly what Hirsh-Pasek indicates. None of the stories
and “data” given in the book constitutes anything like proof that
Doman-trained children will do any better later in life than the
relevant comparison group, i.e., children of parents who are
equally well educated and motivated, but who do not use Doman’s
methods. There was no control study. Even worse, the data took
the form of parental opinions in reply to rather vague questions in
mailed-back questionnaires (and so both simple bias and selfselection bias can be expected).
So much for concessions. Now onto an obvious yet crucial point,
that, puzzlingly, critics virtually never own up to.
The lack of proof establishes that early reading methods are
ineffective only if there has been an attempt at serious scientific
proof, and the attempt was not borne out. Hirsh-Pasek, Wolf, and
many similar critics have claimed that there is no proof that
children who learn to read early experience long-term academic
gains, which is true enough, but this is frequently stated as if it
implied that studies have shown that there are no gains.
But that is not the case.
12. Does early reading really have long-term advantages?
To the best of my knowledge—not only have I looked myself, I
have asked several experts familiar with the literature for pointers
on this—there has not been a single serious scientific longitudinal
study of the effectiveness of teaching children to read very early
(meaning, at ages 0-3). In other words, the question hasn’t been
studied properly yet, period.
In the absence of relevant empirical evidence, we are left to
speculation. Now, skeptics and hard-nosed scientists are perfectly
justified in suspending judgment and taking a conservative stance
on the issues, I think, and sticking with common practices. This is
the proper scientific stance, and I wouldn’t dream of faulting
anyone for it.
But let us consider the following more definitive, critical claim:
getting a child to read at an unusually early age will not generally
help the child educationally in the long run. Those who start
reading later will catch up, on average. This wholly unproven claim
strikes me as very implausible. Think about it in two steps (cf. the
discussion in Stainthorp and Hughes (2004), pp. 359-60):
(1) There are methods that can in an easy and fun way teach many
children to read at a first-grade level by a very early age—by, let’s
say, age two.
(2) If there is no long-term educational benefit to starting early,
then other children who have the same “reading aptitude” (my
name for the likely ability to read given the combination of
environmental factors like parental book-reading at home, with
innate intelligence) will catch up in reading ability in the long run.
So, Mary starts reading at first-grade level at age two, and John
starts reading at first-grade level at age six. Then, by some later
age—say, ten—Mary and Johnny are both reading at the same
grade level, say, the fourth grade level.
Statistical distributions being what they are, I don’t doubt this has
happened. But the question is, how likely is it, or, what are the
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averages? For the claim to hold true on average, the Marys of the
world would have to progress through three reading grade levels
in eight years, or an average of 0.4 grade levels per year.
Meanwhile, the Johnnys would progress through one grade level
per year. So, to maintain a belief in the inefficacy of early reading,
one would have to believe that starting to read earlier is actually
correlated with a slower overall rate of learning, and over a period
of very many years. But why think that?
There is a reply: of course a younger child will have a slower rate
of learning. Why expect a two-year-old to be able to learn as fast
as a six-year-old? After all, the six-year-old is much more likely to
be developmentally ready to read, and the two-year-old is not.
That sounds plausible. So let’s suppose that Mary goes from a first
grade level at age three to a second grade level at age six, when
John is at the first grade level. Then she is one grade level ahead
of Johnny. One would still have to believe that, just because she
started earlier, she would be likely to (or, such kids on average
would) learn at a significantly slower rate than Johnny after that.
But surely on average, the Marys of the world, taught to read
while babies or toddlers, got more of that essential language
stimulation than the Johnnys, on average. Yet they develop their
abilities more slowly later on? Why think that?
There are several other reasons to expect that the ability to decode
language early might accelerate language learning later on, rather
than slowing it. These reasons have never to my knowledge been
seriously considered by the critics of early reading, no doubt
because the reasons militate so strongly against their own
prejudices—and perhaps also because they might seem to be
trivial matters of common sense.
First, an ability to decode language makes it much easier for a
child to understand reading by parents (and other caretakers).
Especially if the parent helps the child by pointing to the text
being read, the child who can read will be able to match up the
sometimes puzzling sounds coming out of the parent’s mouth
12. Does early reading really have long-term advantages?
with the clearer, more “objective” letters on the page. By entering
the brain through both visual-lexical and auditory modes, the
child simply has a better grasp of what is in the text. That means
better understanding of the text and hence better learning. Of
course, this is just a hypothesis, but it seems very likely to be true;
what a fascinating research project it would be.
Second, as discussed above, children who can read for themselves
often do read when their parents are not on hand. They are able
to absorb more from books that are lying about simply because
they do not depend on parents as much for reading. They do so at
will, not when the parent wants to, but when they want to, and
reading not things that parents want to read, but which they want
to read.
Third, the ability to read opens up as lot more than books. It
opens up the whole world of words that surrounds us, from store
signs and advertisements, to instructions on new toys, to notes
from grandparents, and so on. Since learning to read, my boy has
constantly prattled on about signs, cereal boxes, advertisements,
newspapers, bills—all the print we are surrounded by. The ability
to understand so much more of their world surely tends to
embolden children and make it easier for them to learn all about
the society they live in. If nothing else, decoding the written word
provides many more “teachable moments” and conceptual hooks
for children to hang answers on.
Recall the objection, from earlier sections, that children don’t
understand much of what they read, when they are reading so
young. The discussion above suggests another way to respond:
the objection belies an adequate grasp, or acknowledgment
anyway, of the complexity of the situation. Of course children do
not understand much of what they read. But then, they don’t
understand much spoken language, or much of their experience,
period—that is the nature of childhood. My whole point is that
children who can read at such an early age have many more clues
to explore and piece together their world than they would have if
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they could not decode language. It reflects a lack of imagination
on the part of dismissive experts to fail to recognize just how
profound an advantage the ability to decode language can be for a
very small child. For those of us with early readers, this advantage
does not seem speculative because it is something we see every
day in our children.
Finally, let us not forget that all of this early, enhanced exposure
to print takes place at just the time that the brain is growing most
quickly—at just the time when, for example, it is so easy to
memorize nursery rhymes and songs. Knowledge gained at this
age will tend to be as basic and ingrained as the ability to
understand one’s native spoken language. This is why it is
reasonable to expect early readers to be able to read faster and
with better comprehension later on, and why it is not surprising
that so many parents report just this result. That this is generally
the case is admittedly just a hypothesis, but again a plausible and
testable one.
13. No need to be defensive
Oh my goodness—this means I’ve been a bad parent. If it’s
possible and beneficial, shouldn’t I have been teaching my children
how to read?
I suspect that some people resist taking early reading programs
seriously because, if they did and their children were past
toddlerhood, they might be inclined to conclude that they made a
serious mistake as parents. After all (so you might think to
yourself), if it is possible to give your children a four-year head
start on reading, haven’t you failed if you did not give them this
opportunity? That’s not what I think, but perhaps others have this
worry.
This worry must be especially bothersome for early childhood
educators and reading and child development experts: if there
were anything to programs like this, they in particular surely feel
13. No need to be defensive
that they should have been on board. That is why, for
professionals in the field, the cost of keeping an open mind about
these programs, both emotional and intellectual, must be very
high. It is no doubt much easier to dismiss such programs out of
hand, ignore arguments and evidence, and endorse the usual views
about reading readiness and the importance of play.
Along the same lines, at least one person I spoke to about very
early reading basically accused me, or perhaps the Your Baby Can
Read videos, of pressuring mothers. She thought that I was saying
that she was a bad parent if she did not use these tools. I must
confess I found this unexpected and extremely puzzling at first.
I certainly said no such thing, and putting anybody on the
defensive was very far from my aim.
But on reflection, it makes sense, of course. Some of the sales
hype does unfortunately use pressure tactics, which I find
tasteless. Besides, I was saying that it is possible to teach very
young children to read, that this isn’t very hard, and that children
probably greatly benefit from this. So, what parent, who had not
used such methods, would not feel a little defensive?
I’d like to tell these parents that such defensiveness is not
necessary. I started reading when I was five, not one, and I turned
out all right. Don’t you feel the same? Many of us are not
unhappy with our education, and yet we were (most of us) not
taught to read at such an early age. I’m sure many of the smartest
people in the world started reading at age five or after. In
Miseducation, David Elkind supplies a list of famous smart people
who did not receive intensive early education. So of course you
aren’t dooming your children to intellectual mediocrity by failing
to teach them to read early.
Besides, nobody is going to blame you, and you shouldn’t blame
yourself, if you do decide that this is an opportunity you should
have considered earlier. The issues involved with very early
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learning are complex, and still very much controversial, and so it
is perfectly reasonable to take a cautious position on them.
CONCLUSION
1. Some take-aways
The last few years have been an eye-opening journey for me,
discovering that it is possible to teach a toddler and preschooler—
lovingly and without forcing—far more than I ever knew he
would be capable of learning.
By way of summing up both parts of this essay, I will list what are
for me the most important “take away” points.
 Reading a lot of both fiction and nonfiction is the only way
to learn a lot. To build the brain, read. This is true even
from the first year of life, and it is still true in the Internet
Age, despite fashionable speculation to the contrary. To
read to a child is to give him not only concepts, but also
acquaintance with language more generally and of how to
organize and describe his experience of the way the world
works. There is no reason to postpone lots of reading until
school age. A child’s intellectual level is indicated by what
he is interested in and apparently capable of taking on
board. There is no reason to save more “advanced” books
for a later age if a child shows interest in the more advanced
material. (Just don’t present too much material that is outside
of his comfort zone, and always include plenty of easy
stuff, at and below his comprehension level, as well.)
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 A lot of people still don’t believe that it is possible to teach
tiny tots to read, even after watching some YouTube
videos, the YBCR infomercials, talking to a few people, and
maybe even reading this essay. It seems to be one of those
things about which people say, with perfect sense, “If it
sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” I expect that
some people with that attitude will dismiss my son’s story
by saying, “Well, this is just the result of smart genes and a
very involved father.” But this conclusion does not quite fit
the evidence. My wife and I do not claim to be “geniuses”
(we have scored well on standardized tests, but not at
super-genius levels). In terms of the learning potential of
our grey matter, we think of ourselves as ordinary welleducated people. I have little doubt that my friends and
family would be able to achieve similar results with their
children. There are many people who say they are fairly
average both in intelligence and education and who report
really excellent results with YBCR and the Doman
methods. That puts the lie to the claim that there is
something very unusual about my son in terms of his
natural potential. This means that the real debate is about
whether we should teach our kids to read so early—not
whether we can.
 Think what you like about Glenn Doman and his methods,
but he was to my mind certainly right about one thing: very
young children have a tremendous ability to absorb
information, far more information than we usually provide
to them in very early childhood. Moreover, they have a
thirst for knowledge, and slaking that thirst when they are
enthusiastic about a book or educational activity is the very
opposite of pressuring them. Anyone who has taken
Doman’s methods to heart will not pressure a child or
make him uncomfortable with educational activities.
 But you must be quite sensitive to a young child in
determining whether he really wants to do something.
1. Some take-aways
Elkind was right, of course, that children often want to
please their parents, and they may say “yes,” or not say
“no,” even when they aren’t interested in doing something.
It’s important not just to ask whether your child wants to
do something, but to discover and help him get deeper into
what he’s really enthusiastic about. Along the way, if you
take a creative approach and try out many different
educational activities, being sensitive to when your child is
no longer interested, he will absolutely adore educational
activities. When it feels like playing, you will be able to
teach him loads.
 If there is any danger here, it is the failure to realize that, to
satisfy a child’s curiosity properly, one must always be ready
to give up one’s carefully-devised plans and try something
new. A child’s creative, inquisitive mind will not conform
to an inappropriately narrow plan. So—keep up, Mom and
Dad! Parents who take up these methods can sometimes, I
think, fail to realize how much creativity and trial-and-error
it can take to execute them properly. If your child is not
enthusiastic about something you’re doing, you should
stop, but then definitely do try something else. Don’t be
discouraged. Maybe you should try teaching what you’re
teaching in a completely different way. Or you can also try
it the same way a month or a year later, and it might work
then. You should not simply give up on helping your child
to learn because your child does not go along with your
plans, nor should you of course try to force your wishes
upon a resisting child (at least, not in the earlier years), or
even a merely unenthusiastic child. There are so many
things that a child wants to and is ready to learn
enthusiastically that it would be a huge waste not to tap
into that natural reservoir of motivation.
 There is not just one way to teach very young children to
read. It is simply wrong to associate early reading either
with phonics worksheets or with whole word reading.
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The phenomenon is now bigger than Glenn Doman and
his methods, and also bigger than YBCR and its products.
It is time that reading researchers and society in general
woke up to the fact that parents have taught many
thousands of babies and toddlers to read for over a
generation now, and using a variety of different methods.
 It is possible to teach tiny children to read with phonics—
but there is a very important caveat. Most of us associate
“phonics” with workbooks and computer programs, which
are designed for older children. It is not possible to teach
babies, toddlers, and most preschoolers with such methods.
But my phonics flash card program, for example, worked
well for us, and some parents have downloaded the cards
and reported good results too.
 I recommend incorporating complete, explicit phonics, in
some appropriate form, even for babies and toddlers. It is
well-known and has been proven repeatedly by hard-nosed
reading researchers that many children who start learning
English at the normal age (5-6) sometimes have a very hard
time learning to read with methods that eschew systematic
phonics. Not all children can infer the rules of phonics
inductively from whole-word examples. If this is true of
five-year-olds, it might be true of babies as well. Doman,
Titzer, Kailing, and others appear skeptical of this point,
but no studies yet prove that babies uniformly are able to
learn the rules of phonics inductively. Considering the
substantial number of parents who complain that their
baby readers have not (by age two) gone beyond the words
they’ve memorized, there seems to be some anecdotal
evidence that some babies cannot learn phonetic rules
inductively. Titzer told me he has seen many examples of
sub-twos who could sound out new words, and I don’t
dispute that. My concern is about the children who don’t
learn how to sound out new words.
1. Some take-aways
 For all I know, it might cause some problems if parents
teach a child to read but not also do other early literacy
activities. (I don’t know this, of course.) It is surely a
missed opportunity, at least, to give a child the tools to
decode text while withholding the conceptual tools to get
meaning from the text. This might very well cause the child
to associate reading with boredom. There are many ways to
build a child’s conceptual storehouse and vocabulary, but
the most important is to read to the child—a lot, about
everything.
 One of the most common skeptical reactions that one
comes across to the very early teaching of reading is to
dismiss it as the pathetic desire of ambitious, competitive
parents for their children to “win” and be the best. I think
this prejudice is rooted in a lack of acquaintance with very
many people who actually use these programs. I’ve been
interacting with parents (mostly mothers) who are trying to
teach their children to read, and they seem to be ordinary,
caring people. The only thing that seems different about
them is the strength of their conviction that they really can
positively benefit their children by teaching them to read,
and in other ways, from an early age; and yes, they do seem
smarter than average. I do not see evidence of
competitiveness, but actually exactly the opposite. The
parents engaged in teaching their kids in this way seem
mutually supportive, and if anything, unusually kind. They
also do not seem to me to be unbalanced, but actually quite
sane people. Many of them are afraid, as I was at first, of
“coming out of the closet” as supporters of baby reading. It
takes courage, time, and emotional energy to go against
common practice and academic opinion, to “buck the
establishment.”
 So, with all due respect, it is time for some researchers to
stop their insulting and unfair characterizations of the
motives and practices of the parents who take up these
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programs. Or, if they want to continue to heap scorn upon
these well-meaning parents, they should behave like the
scientists they are, and actually study the real-life
phenomena they are dismissing with such insults. At this
point, there is no need for further speculation and
guesswork; many people are crying out for studies. If you
think that these methods are damaging, or not beneficial,
then prove it.
 Another prejudice I would like to see disappear is the
notion that the parents who undertake early education
think that playing is a waste of time, or that they discourage
much free, imaginative play. The fact is that even the
program I have undertaken with my boy has left him many,
many hours of completely unstructured time for free play.
He is an absolute fiend for Legos, and we play plenty of
games and sports too, of course. We do most of our
educational activities at mealtimes. Outside of mealtimes,
we probably play together more than we “learn.” I’ve seen
similar remarks from other parents as well, that their very
small children spend most of their time playing, and that
the learning activities they undertake use up relatively little
time in the day. In any event, parents who do much very
early education are made to seem like humorless drudges
who don’t want their children to have any fun—but I
seriously doubt that that is fair or accurate for the vast
majority.
 To my mind, there is a significant chance that we, as a
society, should support very early reading much more than
we do; and it is crucial that we better understand that the
activities that make this both feasible and beneficial are
different from Kindergarten and “academic preschool”
work. For a while, I feared the reaction of people to the
notion that we are teaching our son to read. With my
experience and the research I’ve done, I am now pretty well
convinced that a lot of the resistance is unwarranted and
2. When should we start teaching our children to read, and
how?
uninformed. I will try to keep an open mind on the issue,
but my view right now is that it is entirely possible to teach
most ordinary children how to read at a much earlier age
than is common now. I also find it very plausible that on
average there are significant long-term benefits to doing so,
though I agree this has not been proven as of this writing.
But just think: if these views are shown to be correct, their
broad adoption in society would be hugely beneficial. What
if it were normal for all children in or before preschool to
be exposed to something like YBCR (perhaps something
free, online, or on public television)? And what if, as a
result, very many of them did in fact learn to read
effortlessly and naturally, as Doman has claimed for his
methods? Finally, what if these children were, individually,
greatly benefitted by these early reading experiences in the
long run? The prospect of putting videos like YBCR
especially in low-income daycares and preschools is exciting
to me. If someone can prove to me that that would be a bad
thing, I would be very surprised (and saddened).
 Considering the possible benefits, researchers should
investigate the specific issues raised in this essay empirically
and with urgency.
2. When should we start teaching our children to
read, and how?
This question is really a topic for another essay. Moreover, I can
speak only from my own experience and amateur study of the
topic. So I feel comfortable offering just a few pieces of advice,
most of which I have learned from others.
 It is a great idea to start reading to your baby as early as the
baby will pay attention. (During his “active” time, I could
hold my one-month-old baby’s attention for five minutes
with a simple board book.) By six months, some babies can
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sit still in their parents’ laps for a long time; when my first
was a baby, I frequently sat him in my lap and read a dozen
board books to him for an hour. It doesn’t hurt to read to a
baby; most babies, I gather, like it a lot, especially if it’s
“cuddle time” and you use funny voices and point at
pictures and make it interactive.
 Read a lot of ABC books, even to a baby. This is the fun
and easy way to get acquainted with the alphabet. After
your child has started learning the alphabet, check out the
wonderful Starfall.com and Literactive.com websites to
build on that basis. Lots of apps teach the same things.
 As to when to start using presentations, I did that with my
second child at about the same time I started reading to
him—right away. A good presentation is like a book, so if
you are reading books to your child, you can do
presentations too. Of course, if your baby cannot focus on
a computer or TV screen from your lap, or on cards, you
might have to wait. Or—as I’ve done—hold an iPad within
his range of focus.
 As your baby grows to toddlerhood, you can get down on
the floor with your child and play with letter magnets,
blocks, and alphabet toys. Emphasize the sounds of the
letters, and practice sounding out the simplest words like
“go” and “me” and “cat.”
 If you have any desire to follow a phonics flashcards
program just as we did, you’d wait to use the cards until
your child has mastered both the names and the sounds of
the letters, especially the consonants. (A good phonics
program teaches various vowel sounds, so knowing the
intricacies of vowel sounds is not a prerequisite.) Your
child should also be capable of learning to say the words
out loud.
3. The importance of supporting early readers in school
 I’ve been asked whether I think the flashcards can be used
before a child can speak, with children who have gone
through YBCR, Doman presentations, Little Reader, etc.
My answer is that I don’t know; maybe. When some
children, who began learning to read as babies, begin to
speak, they might already know the easiest sets of the
flashcards. In that case, I would advise them to skip ahead
to those sets that seem to pose a little challenge. I was using
flashcards with my own son for many months after he was
able to work out new words (and even new phonics rules),
and I’m sure that that practice helped.
 Keep reading to your child well, long after your child has
started learning to read independently. Move your finger
under the words as you read; this is excellent practice,
especially after your child starts to learn to read.
There is much more to say on this question, obviously—there are
books about it in this essay’s bibliography.
3. The importance of supporting early readers in
school
Let’s suppose that it is possible to teach a child to read at an early
age in a positive, pressure-free way, and the child will academically
benefit from the experience. Even then, there is a problem I
haven’t considered yet. What if an early-reading child does not fit
in at school, if he is so much more advanced at reading? Wouldn’t
a parent be setting her child up for boredom and social
awkwardness later on?
Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird even encountered resistance from
her teacher:
…as I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her
eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First Reader
and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register
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aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me
with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell
my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with
my reading.
“Teach me?” I said in surprise. “He hasn’t taught me
anything, Miss Caroline. Atticus ain’t got time to teach me
anything,” I added, when Miss Caroline smiled and shook
her head. “Why, he’s so tired at night he just sits in the
living room and reads.”
“If he didn’t teach you, who did?” Miss Caroline asked
good-naturedly. “Somebody did. You weren’t born reading
The Mobile Register. … Your father does not know how to
teach. You can have a seat now.”
I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my
crime.
There does seem to be a problem here: if a child learns to read at a
very early age, then he will surely be bored if he is forced into a
situation in which he basically has to review what he already
knows. Being the over-prepared brainy kid not only
inconveniences teachers (like Scout’s), it could also lead to social
awkwardness. This problem resonates with those people who are
horrified at the prospect that their children would be different or
abnormal (even if abnormally smart). Since I’ve always been
different and abnormal, I don’t find the prospect very horrifying,
but that’s just me. I totally understand if others feel otherwise.
But the boredom problem, I take that seriously.
I have encountered two different approaches to this problem,
both of which admit that the problem is real and needs to be
addressed. The first approach is to say that children who start
reading very early should either go to special schools or, barring
that, find teachers at ordinary schools who are willing to challenge
and support the students properly. The students may also be able
3. The importance of supporting early readers in school
to skip grades (as many early readers in Durkin’s studies did, and
as Titzer’s daughters did).
The importance of supporting early readers was interestingly
underscored in a paper given by Durkin (1971) titled “Early
Reading Instruction—Is It Advantageous?” She said:
What I have discovered in doing longitudinal research...is
that it comes close to impossible to learn about the future
value of earlier starts because schools, as now constituted,
seem unable to take advantage of them. The point I’m
making is simply this: if children who read when they enter
first grade—either because of home or school help—are
treated as if they cannot read, then, quite obviously, it is
impossible for a researcher to assess the future value of
their earlier start.
...[W]e will never be able to come up with meaningful
assessments of pre-first grade starts in reading unless
schools use and take advantage of such starts.
Also, Stainthorp and Hughes (2004) have a relevant observation
about the children they studied:
…given that the YER (early reading) children must have
made very rapid progress in teaching themselves to read
fluently before they entered school, there does seem to be
a sense that they were marking time in terms of reading
during the later primary years. They may have benefited
from specific programmes to boost their higher-order
reading skills, but this did not happen.
Precocious reading skill certainly does not seem to be an
unsecured surface skill that washes out. … This document
makes the point that high ability does not always result in
high attainment. The data from this follow-up study
suggest that original high reading ability at the age of five
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did appear to result in high attainment at the age of eleven.
However, the longitudinal trends lead us to question
whether the YER children might have made accelerated
progress if given specific support in school to enable them
to capitalise on their early achievements. (p. 370)
You might be creating a voracious reading and knowledge
monster: be prepared to feed it.
This leads me to the second approach, because indeed some
people might not be able to find the right school, teachers, or
program to support their children when they get to school age.
Like most people, I had quite a few excellent public school
teachers, and I would not be the person I am today without their
wonderful teaching and guidance. Nevertheless, we have been
planning to home school our boys since before they were born.
Indeed, home schooling is what we have been doing with our
first. So we will simply continue doing the same (with perhaps a
little more structure as they gets older).
Since many people are not financially in a position to do this, or
have philosophical objections to home schooling, I wouldn’t
dream of recommending this for everyone. I am simply saying
that if you do plan to try to teach your children to read at an early
age, you might want to think about home schooling them—in
case you are successful. Then you can let them develop
educationally at their own pace, benefitting by following their own
interests and strengths instead of what a classroom of their nonreading age peers are forced to do all at the same time. Otherwise,
as I said, you should try your best to find schools or individual
teachers who can nurture your child’s thirst for knowledge.
Another solution is to get supplemental tutoring or other
academic enrichment activities, to keep your child learning at the
same accelerated rate that she did before school. This, apparently,
is what some Doman-trained children do, according to Neil
Harvey in Kids Who Start Ahead, Stay Ahead.
4. What is the point?
I do have to admit that if none of these answers is satisfactory for
you, you might very well not want to help your children to learn
to read at an early age. If you do, they might become abnormal—
abnormally good readers, and unusually curious and engaged
students, that is. But abnormal nevertheless, and the world is
always not set up well for abnormal people. In some ways, it
might well be easier for everyone to wait until school to teach
your children to read.
So I wouldn’t want to say that, at present, we should all be
teaching our children to read as babies and toddlers. Of course, if
more people were to teach reading to babies and toddlers, then
there would be such a crop of advanced learners by school age
that they would have to be accommodated. But then, it would
become normal, and socially acceptable, and then the problem
would go away. That, I think, would be the best solution. But, as
I write this in 2010, it seems unlikely.
4. What is the point?
I want to conclude by answering a question that must be on the
mind of anyone thinking seriously about teaching their children to
read early: what, really, is the point?
Here is an unappreciated, though perfectly obvious, observation:
once your child has learned how to read, she does not need to
re-learn. Simply learning to decode the language phonetically is,
for some children, very stressful and difficult. What if it turns out
that those children, the ones who find learning to read really
difficult at age six, could have learned how to read quite easily
when their brains were more plastic and more receptive to it?
What I am suggesting may sound ridiculous: perhaps, totally
contrary to popular belief and practice, as well as expert opinion,
the first years are actually the “developmentally appropriate” time
for learning to read. If many studies confirm that most babies can
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be taught to read without much difficulty (and clearly benefit
thereby), then it is possible that some of us will teach our babies
to read just because we do not want them to struggle with reading
when they are five, six, or seven.
Of course, what motivates me and many other early-reading
parents is the unusual benefit we might potentially give our
children. Sometimes we speak of “creating geniuses.” But isn’t it
very implausible that we can “create” geniuses? Personally, I just
want a healthy, happy, and well-educated kid. It seems silly to
pretend that we can make “Little Einsteins” out of our kids.
I do not think that, by learning to read at a very early age, or by
absorbing the information on hundreds of flashcards and
presentations, one will create a “genius.” I have no wish to cause
offense, but those who claim that their children are “geniuses”
just because they have been trained to read at an early age are
being a little ridiculous. The mere ability to decode written
language at age one or two hardly means a child is a genius, any
more than the ability to use and understand sign language at that
age does. Glenn Doman’s enthusiasm for the abilities of children
is charming and infectious, but I have found his claims to be able
to make geniuses a little much to swallow.
But this concession only raises the question: if we aren’t creating
geniuses, why really should we consider going to the time, trouble,
and expense of following very early education methods?
I will wait for the results of empirical studies before insisting on
definitive claims, but my guesses are as follows. I think that
children who learn to read as babies or toddlers will—on average,
and especially if their skills and interests continue to be supported
once they are school age—do significantly better in their overall
educational development than they would if they do not have this
early training. By learning to read at an early age, a child is not
merely getting a “head start,” he is absorbing the skills, habits, and
concepts crucial to reading at the same time and in the same way
4. What is the point?
that he absorbs nursery rhymes. Reading becomes “second
nature.” I don’t think that having such reading skills will make it
significantly likely that he will have the mental acuity and creativity
of an Einstein—but it will probably help his long-term
educational goals. Again, I know this is just speculation, but it
seems very reasonable to me, and in the absence of better
evidence, I feel justified in acting on what seems very reasonable.
I should add that Elkind brings this issue up in Miseducation
(pp. 16-23) saying that it is a “popular argument” that early
instruction at home has created the world’s geniuses, and that this
is supposed to be why we should try early education at home. He
easily refutes this weak argument by pointing out that there were
many great people from history, and a roster of MacArthur
Fellows, who did not receive anything like intensive early
education. To be sure, there are some who have made this sort of
argument, and insofar as the argument is that genius requires early
training, it is obviously a poor argument. But a better argument
aims to show something more modest, namely, that certain kinds
of early training can foster increased intelligence, and Elkind’s
response does not respond to this argument at all. To put it
simply: if you use YBCR (for example) and thereby learn to read
at age one, will your educational outcome or IQ be better twenty
years down the road? I think there is some chance of this.
Reading about Doman’s wunderkinder, I had the same reaction
that many people have to child prodigies: that’s amazing, that’s
startling, that’s all very nice, but the real question is whether
knowing all those facts or having those skills at an early age will
greatly improve the future abilities of the children to learn or
perform. Now, don’t get me wrong. As long as they stay at least as
enthusiastic about learning as they otherwise would, having skills
and knowing facts early must benefit them. There are worse
things a 4-year-old could be doing with his time than
enthusiastically practicing the piano. As one correspondent
pointed out to me, “the present is all we’ve really got, and if a
child delights in learning and having new ideas suggested to him,
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what more reason does one need?” But for me the more
important question is whether having these skills and facts early
on will greatly improve the future abilities—and lives—of those
children.
Indeed, that’s the whole reason some of us get excited about all
these educational methods. Seeing a child do something or recite
some fact precociously may be exciting, but mainly because this
seems to indicate that the child is farther down the path to
knowledge, or more intelligent, or better prepared to learn. After
all, if a person were stuck with the knowledge and skills of the
most talented five-year-old on Earth for the rest of his life, he
would be an ignoramus as an adult—an idiot savant at best.
Insofar as what we’re caring about is knowledge, what matters is
long-term knowledge, or how much knowledge the child will have
when he or she is much older. So I argue that preparing for what
happens after the first five years is our primary task.
Some critics of Doman, YBCR, and similar programs might be
surprised to hear me say all this; I am stealing their thunder, I am
sure. Well, of course I realize all that, and most thoughtful readers
probably do too. I also admit that, from where I sit, I merely have
a reasonable belief—I do not know—that my boy’s store of
knowledge and critical-thinking abilities will be benefitted in the
long term by the educational activities we undertake now. I really
wish I had some empirical proof, one way or another, that these
activities really would be beneficial or not. In the absence of such
proof, the main thing that seems dispositive to me are the many
examples of children who are doing very well in school after
receiving Doman and similar training. Of course, there is also the
common sense argument that there is no good reason to think
that advantages will be lost, if one is not pressuring a child in a
way that makes him burn out or lose interest in learning later.
But again, I am honest enough to admit that I don't know if we
will, in the long run, have the same good long-term results that
some others report. I know we are hearing only these programs’
4. What is the point?
success stories—not so much the stories about failures or
problems. (Though I did discuss some of those above.) This is
why careful scientific studies are so important.
I, and many I speak to online, often say that the reason we train
our children using these methods is that we want the best for our
children; we want to give them every benefit we can. I think this is
a very reasonable and sincere sentiment. But think now about
what this common statement means. We are saying that it is
worth our time, and our children’s, to give them what we hope
will be a long-term advantage in terms of knowledge. And yet
how much do many of we parents care about our own knowledge?
How many parents are engaged in continuing education, or read
many books that greatly expand our intellectual horizons? No
offense, but I doubt it’s very many; we’re busy with our families,
working, and living our lives. For better or worse, for most
people—even many highly educated people—continuing
education must take a back seat to other things like work, family,
and non-intellectual hobbies.
For most of us, then, I think we're just interested in cramming in
as much intellectual improvement into childhood as possible. And
then what? What constitutes end-point success, for a parent who
uses these programs? The child growing up to be smart? Getting a
professional job, or getting a better position? Lots of welleducated kids who did not follow any of these programs can
achieve material success—again, I learned to read at age 5, like
most kids, and I guess I’ve done OK. You might say, “It’s just the
comparative advantage, the benefit.” Fair enough, but that doesn't
answer the question: to what end does the benefit point?
There’s nothing magic about knowing many facts, no ticker-tape
parades for being able to do well on a standardized test, no deep
satisfaction one gets from being “on top.” We rarely, if ever,
encounter any “geniuses” of the sort that we are sometimes
invited to envision—a young person whose intelligence is so
brilliant that it is magical and outshines that of us mere mortals.
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Having been around a few “geniuses” in academia, I firmly
believe that creating a “genius” is not the answer.
My take—and I don’t claim to speak for anyone else—is based on
my notion of what it means to be well-educated. This notion
involves having substantial knowledge about many different
subjects, being able to write well, being able to read difficult texts,
being comfortable with numbers (or excellent, if one is in a
technical field), being able to speak a few languages, and generally
having a sophisticated outlook on human life and our place in the
universe. In short, I have the traditional aim of a deep, serious
liberal arts education. But I think that I personally didn’t really get
as good an education, along those lines, as I could have, at least
not by the time I graduated from high school. I could have
learned so much more than I did in my K-12 schooling. I still
have things to learn that ideally I should have learned in school.
My own educational failures and observing those of so many
people around me has made me very much aware that, despite an
information revolution and all the resources of the digital age, it is
actually very difficult to obtain a very good liberal arts education.
You can get such an education only deliberately and through hard
work and good preparation, and in the face of many distractions.
I think that giving a child the conceptual background and the taste
for knowledge from an early age (which learning to read early can
probably help with), you are making it more likely that the child
will be able to obtain a serious, solid liberal arts education. The
child will be better able to, and hopefully will actually, read more
of the classics; understand, appreciate, and actually read history;
get farther along in math (and actually understand it); and so
forth. That, then, is my own answer.
But if you did not have the goal of a liberal arts education, I
frankly don’t know what the rush would be, unless you had the
notion, again, that simply “being ahead” was desirable for its own
sake. So you’ve “won the race” if you graduate from high school
at age 12. Well, I guess you can start earning big money sooner,
4. What is the point?
which might mean that you will have a longer career and end up
in life a little richer. As a goal that makes some sense in the big
old “game of life,” but it isn’t what fires me up.
My notion is that by starting early, this gives the child the
opportunity to fill up those teenage years with more general
knowledge, more literature and history, a deeper grounding in
science, and so forth—before finally having to go to college,
specialize, and get into a profession. And for those not heading
toward professions, it would help secure a basic level of
knowledge too often lacking in the high school graduates of
today.
There is almost nothing better in life than improving the mind
with knowledge. Some of my happiest and most rewarding times
in high school and college were when I was really learning. Deep
knowledge is life-changing and character-changing. So “starting
early” really has little more purpose to me than to improve the
chances—not to guarantee, because there are no guarantees in
life—that my child will do more of that sort of learning, and enjoy
it, in the long run. That’s why I have taught him to read early.
131
Bibliography
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Christakis, Dimitri A., Frederick J. Zimmerman, David L.
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Doman, Glenn, Janet Doman, and Susan Aisen. How to Give Your
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Elkind, David. Miseducation: Preschoolers at Risk. Knopf, 1987.
Elkind, David. The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon, 25th
Anniversary Ed. Da Capo Press, 2006.
Flesch, Rudolf. Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do
About It. Harper Paperbacks, 1986. (Originally appeared 1955.)
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How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
Flesch, Rudolf. Why Johnny Still Can’t Read. Harper Collins, 1983.
Gentry, J. Richard. Raising Confident Readers: How to Teach Your Child
to Read and Write—from Baby to Age 7. Da Capo Lifelong Books,
2010.
Gopnik, Alison. The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us
about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life. Picador, 2010.
Harvey, Neil. Kids Who Start Ahead, Stay Ahead. Avery, 1994.
Healy, Jane M. Your Child’s Growing Mind: Brain Development and
Learning from Birth to Adolescence, 3rd edition. Three Rivers Press,
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Henderson, Sally J., Nancy Ewald Jackson, and Reisa A. Mukamal.
“Early Development of Language and Literacy Skills of an
Extremely Precocious Reader.” Gifted Child Quarterly Vol. 37,
No. 2 (1993), pp. 78-83.
Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy, Roberta Golinkoff, and Diane Eyer. Einstein
Never Used Flashcards: How Our Children Really Learn—And Why
They Need to Play More and Memorize Less. Rodale Books, 2004.
Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy, et al. A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool:
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Home School Legal Defense Association. “Academic Statistics on
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Iger, Robert A. “The full text of Walt Disney Co.'s letter
demanding a retraction from the UW [University of
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letter dated August 13, 2007.
Jensen, Audra. When Babies Read: A Practical Guide to Helping Young
Children with Hyperlexia, Asperger Syndrome and High-Functioning
Autism. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2005.
Johnson, Susan R. “Teaching our children to read, write & spell: a
developmental approach.” You and Your Child’s Health
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Kailing, Timothy D. Native Reading. CreateSpace, 2008.
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Young Children.” A Joint Position Statement of the
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Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC),
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“Precocious Readers: Past, Present, and Future.” Journal for the
Education of the Gifted Vol. 30, No. 2 (2006), pp. 205–235.
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Sax, Leonard. Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing
Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men. Basic
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Schmidt, Marie Evans, et al. “Television Viewing in Infancy and
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Schwartz, Joel. “Baby DVDs, videos may hinder, not help,
infants’ language development.” Press release from the
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135
136
How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
Popular online articles and videos in favor of very
early reading
Auton, Stephanie. “Your Baby Can Read” (review), Mama Drama
blog, blogs.chron.com, Aug. 15, 2007.
BrillKids.com staff. “The Arguments For + Against Early
Learning,” BrillKids.com.
Degeneres, Ellen. segment from the Ellen show (video about
Graham, age 5, who learned to read using YBCR)
Doman, Glenn. “Why Teach Your Baby to Read?”, The Institutes
for the Achievement of Human Potential, iahp.org
Hall, Janelle. Example of positive local television coverage of
YBCR, WTAE-Pittsburgh; there are many other examples of
such local coverage on YouTube
Robinson, Deborah. “Three year old reading,” allexperts.com
Popular online articles and videos critical of very
early reading
“3-Year-Old Reading Too Early?” BecomingTheParent.com
Cairney, Trevor. “Your Baby Can Read” (blog review), Literacy,
family, and learning (blog), July 18, 2008. See also the long
discussion.
Cairney, Trevor. “Your Baby Can Read - Part 2” (greatly expanded
blog review), Literacy, family, and learning (blog), Feb. 18,
2009.
Conan, Neal. “Can You Make Your Baby Smarter, Sooner?”
NPR’s Talk of the Nation, with guests Jon Hamilton, David
Elkind, and Janet Doman, Oct. 28, 2009.
Elkind, David. “Commentary: The ‘Miseducation’ of Young
Children,” Education Week, Feb. 3, 1998.
Lannan, Renee. “Problems Arise When Children Are Pushed to
Read Too Early,” Gomestic.com, April 17, 2010.
Novella, Steven. “Your Baby Can Read – Not!”, Neurologica Blog
(and see the response by John Rullman further down), July 2,
2009.
Pedigo, Amy. “Early Reading FAQs,” Homeschool.com.
Other popular online articles
Rossen, Jeff and Robert Powell. “ ‘Your Baby Can Read’ claims
overblown, experts say: It’s memorization, not real reading,
child development specialists agree,” Today Show (NBC
News), Nov. 1, 2010.
Swidey, Neil. “Rush, Little Baby: How the push for infant
academics may actually be a waste of time—or worse.” Boston
Globe Magazine, Oct. 28, 2007.
Wright, Tonya, “Teach Your Baby to Read??? An Early
Childhood Educator Speaks Out,” Literacy Connections.
Other popular online articles
American Academy of Pediatrics. “TV and Toddlers.” A Minute
for Kids (radio series); revised Dec. 1, 2006.
Hudson, Judith. “When and how can I teach my toddler to read?”
BabyCenter.com, 2008.
Milloy, Steven. “Baby Video a No-No?” JunkScience.com (blog),
August 23, 2007.
Szabo, Liz. “Why do mothers judge one another and their
parenting?” USA Today, May 24, 2010.
Some books I read to my son before his fourth
birthday
These following lists include some of the “chapter books” we
read as well as some more advanced and “literary” material like
the poetry of Edward Lear and R. L. Stevenson. We started many
more chapter books than this, which my son nixed. Most of these
we read when he was three years old, primarily at bedtime, for 3045 minutes per session, but not infrequently at other times as well.
We read many more books than this—thousands of picture
books, nonfiction, etc., so a full book list would require many
pages.
Amery, Heather. Greek Myths for Young Children.
Atwater, Richard. Mr. Popper's Penguins.
Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Beowulf. Usborne illustrated classic edition.
137
138
How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
Carroll, Lewis, adapted by Lesley Sims. The Usborne Illustrated Alice.
Usborne “illustrated classic” edition.
Collodi, Carlo. Adventures of Pinocchio. (Read twice in a row.)
Dalgliesh, Alice. The Bears on Hemlock Mountain.
Dicamillo, Kate. Mercy Watson to the Rescue. And the next two
Mercy Watson books.
Earth & Space. Question and answer format encyclopedia.
Gannett, Ruth Stile. My Father's Dragon. Then Elmer and the Dragon
and The Dragons of Blueland.
Illustrated Classics for Girls. Usborne illustrated classic edition,
features greatly simplified, 65-page versions of The Railway
Children, The Wizard of Oz, Black Beauty, The Secret Garden, Little
Women, and Heidi. (“For boys” was not available until summer
2010.)
Illustrated Classics from Dickens. Usborne illustrated classic edition;
five novels greatly simplified.
Lear, Edward. Complete Nonsense. Read all of the limericks and
most of the poems.
Le Guin, Ursula. Catwings.
Le Guin, Ursula. Catwings Return.
Milne, A. A. Winnie-the-Pooh and selections from other Milne.
O’Brien, Robert C. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nihm.
Osborne, Mary Pope. The Magic Tree House: #1-30 & 35.
The Oxford Picture Dictionary. (We had covered 2/3 or so of this by
his 4th birthday.)
Prelutsky, Jack, ed. Read-Aloud Poems for the Very Young.
Stevenson, R. L. A Child’s Garden of Verses.
Warner, Gertrude. Boxcar Children.
Wilder, Laura I. Farmer Boy. Halfway through at fourth birthday.
Wilder, Laura I. Little House in the Big Woods.
Wild, Wild World. Question and answer format encyclopedia of
animals.
White, E.B. Charlotte's Web. (Read twice.)
White, E.B. Stuart Little.
White, E.B. The Trumpet of the Swan. (Halfway through a second
reading at fourth birthday.)
Wyss, Johann. Swiss Family Robinson. Simplified adaptation.
Index
B
baby reading, 66
barking at print/word calling, 28, 45, 54, 56,
57, 89
BrillKids.com, 4, 7, 26, 36, 52, 58, 62, 85, 88,
91, 136
C
Cairney, Trevor, 7, 52, 78, 84-86, 136
Charlotte’s Web, 15, 31, 32, 41, 138
Children Who Read Early, 27, 84, 94, 102,
133
concept books, 37, 38, 40
concepts, 10, 18, 32, 35, 37-40, 42, 55, 87,
96, 101, 109, 113, 117
conceptual readiness, 57
D
decoding, 3, 16, 17, 24-26, 29, 39, 48-55,
63, 64, 69, 86-88, 90, 92, 99, 101,
108-10, 117, 125, 126
Doman, Glenn, 4-6, 10, 13, 19, 21, 23, 26,
27, 35-38, 40, 43, 49-52, 58, 60, 66, 77,
79, 82, 86, 88, 95-98, 105, 106, 114, 116,
119, 121, 124, 126-28, 133, 136
Dr. Seuss, 10, 15, 66
Durkin, Dolores, 27, 84, 93, 94, 102, 104,
105, 123, 133
E
egalitarianism, 59, 60
Elkind, David, 61, 70, 72, 79, 84, 95-101,
111, 115, 127, 133, 136
F
Flesch, Rudolf, 13, 14, 18, 24, 133, 134
H
Healy, Jane M., 32, 87, 88, 89, 90, 134
Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy, 77, 105, 106, 134, 135
home schooling, 72, 124
hothousing, 71, 72, 79
How to Teach Your Baby to Read, 4, 35, 133
Hughes, Diana, 103, 105, 107, 123, 135
hype, about baby reading, 6, 49, 57-59, 111
hyperlexia, 48, 66, 134
K
Kailing, Timothy D., 8, 14, 28, 30, 116, 134
Kids Who Start Ahead, Stay Ahead, 106,
124, 134
L
LeapFrog (company), 10, 15, 16
Legos, 16, 42, 90, 118
Literactive.com, 15, 120
Little Reader (software), 26, 52, 121
M
Magic Tree House, 15, 31, 33, 55, 88, 91,
138
Miseducation - Preschoolers at Risk, 61, 7072, 79, 95, 97, 111, 127, 133, 136
N
Native Reading, 14, 18, 30, 134
O
Oxford Picture Dictionary, 35, 38, 39, 138
P
phonics, 5, 13, 17-19, 24, 25, 27-30, 43, 5052, 85, 86, 115, 116, 120, 121
phonics flashcards, 16, 18, 19, 29, 31, 32,
35, 70, 71, 86, 99, 120
Pinocchio, 15, 31, 35, 138
play, 5, 15, 28, 41, 42, 72, 74, 77-80, 86, 92,
97, 111, 115, 118, 120
PowerPoint, 26, 35-37, 40, 41, 88
precocious readers, 65, 104, 135
presentations, 26, 35-38, 40, 41, 43, 51, 70,
74, 88, 120, 121, 126
pressure, from parents, 21, 58, 68-70, 72,
84, 111, 114, 121
progressivism, 60, 61
140
How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read
R
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 59, 67, 80, 135
S
Sax, Leonard, 92-94, 135
sounding out, 6, 13, 17, 21-25, 29, 34, 50,
51, 52, 60, 120
Stainthorp, Rhona, 103, 105, 107, 123, 135
Starfall.com, 11, 15, 16, 29, 30, 120
Stuart Little, 15, 31, 85, 138
T
Titzer, Robert, 4, 5, 8, 14, 17, 19, 25, 27, 5052, 55, 63, 66, 77-79, 82, 88, 98, 99, 101,
102, 105, 116, 123, 135
Trumpet of the Swan, The, 15, 31, 138
U
Unschooling, 81, 83
Usborne Publishing, 10, 92, 137, 138
V
very early readers, 3, 5, 6, 8, 36, 45, 49, 50,
51, 53, 56, 61-64, 67, 71, 77, 84, 89, 95,
98, 101, 104-6, 111, 118, 136
videos, 3, 4, 7, 11-14, 17, 25-28, 36, 45-48,
52, 54, 56, 58, 59, 62, 73-76, 78, 82, 86,
96, 98, 99, 111, 114, 119, 136
vocabulary, 10, 14, 18, 19, 32, 34, 35, 38-42,
53, 87-89, 93, 101, 117
W
WatchKnow.org, 5, 8, 41, 43, 62, 65
whole word method, 17, 36, 43, 51, 53, 86,
115
Y
Your Baby Can Read, 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 16-18,
25-29, 32, 35, 43, 49, 51, 52, 59, 60, 62,
63, 65, 69-71, 73, 74, 76, 78, 82, 85-87,
99, 100, 111, 114, 116, 119, 121, 127,
128, 136, 137
YouTube, 3, 4, 11, 12, 46, 52, 56, 62, 114